Peter Schickele, the bassoonist and composer best-known for his comedy alter-ego, P.D.Q. Bach, has died at 88.
Schickele introduced the fictional “last and by far the least” son of Johann Sebastian Bach while he was a graduate student at the Juilliard School in the 1950s, reviving a “Sanka Cantata” (spoofing Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”) that he had co-composed as a teenager and introducing a “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” (an instrument modeled after the once-popular food Automat) for a student concert.
“P.D.Q. Bach concerts soon became annual staples at Juilliard and at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where Mr. Schickele studied during the summer,” Margalit Fox writes in an obituary for The New York Times.
The formal debut of his comic character, in 1965 at New York’s Town Hall, was recorded and released by Vanguard Records as “Peter Schickele Presents an Evening With P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742)?” Subsequent recordings, four of which won Grammy awards for best comedy album, and extensive concert tours established Schickele’s brand of musical erudition cloaked in broad, slapstick foolery.
His musical satire, Fox writes, “betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart – or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.”
Schickele wound down his P.D.Q. tours in the early ’90s, but occasionally staged revivals, culminating in a 50th-anniversary performance in 2015 at Town Hall.
Along with such memorable P.D.Q. Bach creations as “The Abduction of Figaro,” “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” “Oedipus Tex” and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons,” Schickele also composed music ranging from chamber and symphonic works to arrangements for albums by Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, tunes for the Broadway show “Oh! Calcutta!” (he played bassoon in its pit orchestra) and the soundtrack for the 1972 film “Silent Running.”
He also produced and hosted “Schickele Mix,” playing classical music alongside jazz and rock, which aired on public radio stations in the ’90s.
Fox’s Times obituary:
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