If you're of a certain age and received sufficient (or maybe even any) music education, the name of P.D.Q. Bach may resound, perhaps in not all the musically appropriate ways, in your memory. P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), long notorious as the last and least of Johann Sebastian Bach's 20-or-so children, is, of course, the fictitious brainchild of Peter Schickele (born 1935), intended as a spoof of classical music of that era, and it seems, all eras since. Schickele, with help from his younger brother David, conceived the idea of P.D.Q. Bach in 1954 or so, during his time as a student at Juilliard. A little over a decade later, the first big scale live P.D.Q. Bach occurred at on April 24, 1965, at Town Hall, New York City, per my copy of the 4-CD set compilation of the early Vanguard Classics albums of P.D.Q. Bach. Next Monday and Tuesday at Town Hall, the 50th anniversary of that first big P.D.Q. Bach bash is being commemorated.
This profile of Schickele by James R. Oestreich of the NYT gives a nice recent update, with appropriate dribs and drabs of P.D.Q. Back lore. Oestreich noted the long-running history of those P.D.Q. Bach concerts:
"In 1965, he began annual P. D. Q. Bach concerts in New York, rich, inimitable mixtures of slapstick and sophistication, parody (as in Oedipus Tex, P.D.Q.’s “infamous Western oratorio”) and sincerity.
In the early days, he sometimes swung onto the stage like Tarzan from a high balcony or risked his neck in some other way.”
Of course, that was then, and as Oestreich immediately notes, this is now:
"But decades pass, and age happens. Mr. Schickele stopped the New York run 10 years ago.
“I had health problems during that time and was in and out of the hospital,” he said recently..."
One review from around that time, by Anthony Tommasini of the NYT, noted of the 2004 P.D.Q. Bach concert:
"Mr. Schickele, who is 69, has long been anticipating the 40th anniversary in 2005 of his P.D.Q. Bach enterprise, which in its heyday was hugely, and deservedly, popular. But of late the audience for Mr. Schickele's big annual P.D.Q. Bach concert in New York at Carnegie Hall and, more recently, Avery Fisher Hall has been falling off, and he has had more difficulty attracting co-sponsors for these events. For a while it looked as if there might be no New York concert this year.
Instead, Mr. Schickele decided to present a greatly scaled-down program at a much smaller concert hall, Symphony Space, for two performances, Wednesday and yesterday. The change of location took the concert right to Manhattan's Upper West Side, which boasts a high concentration of hard-core P.D.Q. Bach fans, those well-informed music lovers who know the classical repertory that Mr. Schickele so cleverly lampoons and who get all the musical jokes."
Jump back to now, where to overcome the financial issues, there was a Kickstarter campaign to set up a 50th anniversary concert for P.D.Q. Bach. It worked, in the space of 2 weeks, from the October 15 launch. In fact, it was successful enough that the organizers could set up a 2nd performance. For this upcoming 50th anniversary show, Oestreich notes one concession of Schickele to current reality:
"The acrobatic entrance will have to go, and the physical humor that was so much a part of the performances will be curtailed. Mr. Schickele turned 80 in July, and he now walks with difficulty, using a cane. He will do the concerts in a wheelchair.
“That way I won’t have to worry about balance problems. It relaxes me a lot.”
But:
"As Mr. Schickele surely knows and undoubtedly intends, the wheelchair will draw laughs, the audience thinking it’s part of the show."
If anyone is there, it will be interesting to see how that goes over. 3CM the loser won't be there, as it never occurred to him that such an event might occur and that he might want to plan for it. He did neither, of course. But I have seen P.D.Q. Bach concerts several times, once at Swarthmore College (half of which time I stood at the far back), once in downtown Philly, and twice in NYC. So in a way, seeing it would have been seeing the same schtick as in the past. But it would have been with extra poignancy underlying the situation, as it's not hard to guess that this would be potentially the last hurrah for the live P.D.Q. concerts in NYC, given his health. I have a somewhat tacky suspicion that this awareness might have underpinned, a bit, how easy it was to assemble an orchestra for these upcoming Town Hall concerts, per Oestreich (emphasis mine):
"[Benjamin] Herman, a perennial, is back this year, as the excellent timpanist and the contractor of the New York Pick-Up Ensemble, the performance’s orchestra. The announcement of the Dec. 28 concert, he said, sent a thrill through the New York freelance community, so beloved is Mr. Schickele among musicians. Looking to hire 35 players, he needed to make only 36 phone calls: One person had out-of-town plans. Everyone else signed on immediately, some canceling more lucrative engagements to do so.
“Absolutely everybody is on board with this thing,” Mr. Herman said, adding of Mr. Schickele: “He’s a miracle of a man. He has brought about so much love and affection and respect and joy in so many people.”
If nothing else, Schickele certainly seems in good spirits, from the NYT profile. One thing that I never knew about Schickele was his childhood bout with polio, which Oestreich noted:
"Mr. Schickele’s own ambitions as a pianist were cut short when he contracted polio at 19. He ended up with limited use of his left hand and a left foot that flops, all of which makes his earlier physical exploits seem even more remarkable."
One other feature of the P.D.Q. Bach concerts that doesn't require that physical dexterity, but more mental dexterity (if that's the word), is the tradition of puns, on which Tommasini discoursed in that December 2004 review:
'During his long spoken introduction to the program, Mr. Schickele showed that he had lost none of his gift for deadpan comic delivery and for taking the audience down meandering verbal setups for excruciatingly bad puns. In one discourse on the German playwright and poet Schiller and his girlfriend, Freude (Joy, in English), Mr. Schickele explained that Freude gave Schiller large sums of money when times were hard. So Schiller wrote a poetic tribute to her to show just how much he ''owed to Joy.''’
More recently, in January 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic, Bernard Holland noted more concisely (blink and you'll miss the pun):
"Mr. Schickele’s dreadful puns (Brittany Spears as French weaponry) would not long survive outside the pomposities and gloomy rituals of the symphonic stage."
Looking ahead, "Professor Peter Schickele", the personage he adopts as the world's leading (nay, only) authority on P.D.Q. Bach, is scheduled to make some guest appearances in March 2016 in Phoenix, AZ and Concord, MA. Fingers crossed that his health holds out, and that we get more music both under his own name (yes, Peter Schickele does publish and write concert hall music under his own name), and maybe even under the P.D.Q. Bach "brand", since, as the article noted, P.D.Q. Bach is the only dead composer who can still be commissioned for new works. Oestreich noted this when he mentioned that the pianist Jeffrey Biegel commissioned a new P.D.Q. Bach piano concerto, and that Schickele's health limitations do have one effect on this new P.D.Q. Bach opus:
"This will be the first concerto not played by me, so I can let loose. I don’t have to keep a lid on it.”
The idea of a truly unrestrained P.D.Q. Bach concerto; hmm.....
With that thought (threat?), you can either:
1. DIscuss P.D.Q. Bach and/or Peter Schickele, or
2. Observe the standard SNLC protocol, for the last time in 2015.
Or, as always with 3CM the ditherer, you can do both :) .