The last of the Bachs has passed away. He was only a fictional character, but he made music lovers laugh for decades. Peter Schickele, the creator of PDQ Bach, died Tuesday at the age of 88, Allan Kozinn, of Washington Post.
PDQ Bach could have inspired a good saying in the language of his presumed patriarch: “ Er war der Letzte, er war das Letzte » (“He was the last of the line, he was the dregs”). Peter Schickele, born in 1935 in Iowa into a family of German immigrants, was a student at the Juilliard School in New York in his twenties. Bassoonist, pianist and composition student of Milhaud and Harris, he was passionate about musical parodies and the rediscovery, then in full swing, of the music of Bach.
His satires and musical parodies under the name PDQ Bach, invented at the turn of the 1960s (the initials PDQ — “ pretty damn quick » — modeled on the abbreviation CPE used for Carl Philip Emanuel), immediately had great success. It’s true, as the recent concert proved Bugs Bunny at the Symphony in Montreal, that the soil of musical parody, cultivated in cartoons by Stalling and Franklyn, was well anchored in the United States. Furthermore, in England, from 1956, Hoffnung concerts elevated musical humor to the rank of a genre in its own right.
After the premature death of Gerald Hoffnung in September 1959 on the other side of the Atlantic, Peter Schickele offered an alternative to fans of the discipline with his PDQ Bach. His parodies used humor on several levels. There is the narrative diversion, as in Oedipus Tex, where the myth of Oedipus (set to music by Stravinsky) is transported to Texas; the Overture 1712 (baroque parody of theOpening 1812 of Tchaikovsky, where Bach travels to Massachusetts) or The kidnapping of Figarosubtitle ” A Simply Grand Opera », parodies of several operas by Mozart, mixed with operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Just like Gerald Hoffnung and Malcolm Arnold, Peter Schickele also liked to invent instruments or make everyday objects sound, for example in the Pervertimento for bagpipes, bicycle and balloons. Schickele had a lot of fun with the titles, for example in the “Unbegun” Symphony (as opposed toUnfinished by Schubert), improbable mixture of all the famous works of the repertoire. In his shows, “Professor Schickele” presented these compositions with humor.
An eclectic composer, Schickele, whose financial well-being was ensured by this character, worked at the same time as a composer of “classical” music, film scores, musical comedies and as an arranger. He was also known as a radio man.
The works of PDQ Bach were excellently recorded in the early 1990s on the now defunct Telarc label. They have earned their authors several Grammy awards. Little has been heard of Schickele in the last two decades, not only because of the disappearance of Telarc, but also because the parody genre is fading as the public has the references to understand it. delight is diminishing.