PDQ

The true believers already know the scene by heart.Monday night at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, a few minutes past 8. A capacity
crowd stirs in anticipation. The unitiated are a little restless, but the
Believers know the order of events. A sleepy-eyed stage manager shuffles out,
glowers at the crowd, blows into the microphone and shuffles back. The
Believers hiss and boo.
The stage manager returns. Professor Schickele, he announces, has become lost.
He was due here in Glendale long ago. (Glendale??? groan the uninitiated.) But
now it looks as if we’ll have to canc…
A hullabaloo in the lobby, a rush down the aisle. Times were when Peter
Schickele, self-proclaimed Professor of Musicological Pathology at the
University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, discoverer of and amanuensis
(sidekick, to you) to the ignoble P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), “last but least of
J.S.Bach’s 20-odd children,” made his famous belated entrances down a high
wire, but that was many years and many pounds ago. Now, at 55, he zoooooms down
the aisle, his concert clothes half-on half-off, his huge yellow workman’s
shoes flailing furiously, the image of a deranged Rasputin trying to look like
Brahms.
Will the concert now begin? Not quite. His breath regained, Schickele returns
to the podium. “There’s a change in the program,” he announces. “May we have
the house lights up, please?”
He directs the audience’s attention to a certain line on a certain page. “You
see that comma in the third line? Well, that has to be changed. It’s supposed
to be a semi-colon.”
Like every detail in these gloriously wise and antic P.D.Q. Bach outings,
Schickele takes this matter of the typos very seriously. If you’d been
backstage an hour before concert time, you’d have found Schickele and his crew,
including the selfsame stage manager, Bill Walters, poring through the night’s
printed program. “I’ve made it a point of honor,” he said in a phone
conversation last week, “never to plant a typo in my own material, but to rely
on the rest of the booklet.”
Has he ever been unable to find one? “One time in San Francisco, we came
close. In desperation, I started to check the printed list of San Francisco
Symphony patrons. I saw one name, Macdonald, with a small d in the middle. Now
I know you can spell it that way, but I had a hunch. Sure enough, after sending
someone to the Symphony office to check, it turned out that it should have been
a capital D. The day was saved!”
And yet, with all that thrill of the chase, and the blessings that the antics
of P. D. Q. Bach have bestowed on deliriously delighted audiences since that
first joint appearance in Manhattan’s Town Hall in April, 1965, Schickele is
about to retire his sterling creation. Monday’s concert will mark the finale of
the collaboration, at least for now. “I’m not calling it a farewell tour,”
said Schickele, “because the next step would be to call it the first annual
farewell tour. I like the idea of indefinite sabbatical, instead.”
The time and place for the grqnd finale are appropriate. Monday is, after all,
April Fool’s Day, which P.D.Q. has, naturally, taken over as his birthday.
Pasadena is equally appropriate. Jorge Mester, currently conductor of the
Pasadena Symphony, was on the podium for P.D.Q.’s debut in 1965, and he will be
on the podium for the finale as well.
The auspices were favorable, at the birth of P.D.Q. Bach. After a time of
musical wandering that included a stint as resident composer in the Los Angeles
Public School system, Schickele ended up at the Juilliard School, “majoring in
cafeteria.” Around a cafeteria table Schickele and some pals — including
Mester and fellow composers Philip Glass and Richard Peaslee — swapped jokes
and wisecracks and doodled some parodies on the more ludicrous aspects of
strict musicology.
Suddenly there was a repertory: a marvelous piece called “Quodlibet” which
played off unlikely tune combinations (“Tea for Two” on top of the Beethoven
Seventh Symphony, for example) and a “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” of which
the name alone was hilarious enough. (Horn & Hardart was the corporate name of
the East Coast restaurant chain better known as Automats.) Schickele, whose
personal musical gods always included both Mozart and Spike Jones, endowed his
new creation with both influences in equal measure. Someone among his friends
and relatives back home in Fargo, North Dakota, came up with the name of
P.D.Q.; Schickele is no longer sure who it was.
The Hardart, a glorious assemblage of noisemakers that would do a Rube Goldberg
proud, was the stellar attraction at the first concert; where is it now?
“Mostly, in my basement in Brooklyn,” said Schickele. “Unfortunately, it’s
in pretty bad shape, because we’ve cannibalized many parts over the years. I
don’t think we could rebuild it. That would mean finding a mixing bowl in A-
flat, for example, or a toy wind-up owl in B-flat. They make those things out
of plastic nowadays, and they don’t make music the way the old ones did.”
No, you’ll never see the Hardart in a concert any more. After Monday night
there’s not much chance, for that matter, of another virtuoso coming along who
can match the virtuosity of the Schickele-P.D.Q. team on the Schlagenfrappe —
a set of cardboard mailing tubes of various sizes played by bounding them off
your head — or the Tuba Mirum (“mere tube), a length of hosepipe filled with
wine.
You’ll miss the live performances of the Cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,”
with its deathless line “only he who is running knows” followed by an aria
based on just those last two words. Or the “Howdy” Symphony, P.D.Q.’s rebuff
to Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony. Or the “1712 Overture,” which puts “Yankee
Doodle” through the same treatment that Tchaikovsky imposed on Russian
folktunes in his “1812.” Or the grand oratorio “Oedipus Tex” or…
We have it all on records, of course. What sets Schickele and his creation
ahead of certain less responsible entertainers who dine well off the inherent
inanities in classical music is this: he is musical, and he is honest.
And after you’ve gone through the records, there is the video of P.D.Q.’s
magnum opus (to date, anyhow), the opera “The Abduction of Figaro,” a
superbly observed Mozartian pastiche (including characters named not only Papa
Geno but also Mama Geno). Unperformed here since its 1984 premiere, the work is
eminently worth any impresario’s attention
If there is an archetypal figure behind the art of P.D.Q., it is Mozart
himself, whose boyhood scores were full of the little cadential cliches that
pop up sidewise in such P.D.Q. masterworks as the “Schleptet,” a brilliantly
observed takeoff that has become a repertory piece on its own. Later in his own
career, Mozart set down the music that clearly prophesied the coming of P.D.Q.
Bach, the sextet known as “A Musical Joke,” which purposely and deliciously
falls into exactly the same compositional traps that Schickele and his pal
would dig anew two centuries later.
And Schickele’s great accomplishment beyond the keenness of these musical
observations is that he has emerged, through the smokescreen of musicology, as
a superb entertainer. What we will miss, most of all, is that stupendous array
of stage tricks. You could go to P.D.Q. Bach resolutely and proudly ignorant of
Mozartian sonata form and Baroque oratorio mannerisms, and still have a
marvelous evening of funny sounds and stage shenanigans. An enlightened society
might have laws against the P.D.Q. Bach deprivation that Peter Schickele now
threatens. He and his alter ego would, in such a society, be locked up, in
adjacent padded cells.
* * * * *
“If I have one regret,” said Schickele, “it’s that I didn’t think up another
funny name for myself — Walter Krankheit, perhaps — when I started with
P.D.Q. Almost the same time as that first concert, a publisher brought out my
first serious compositions under my own name. Inevitably, my serious stuff has
been taken in some circles as the clown wanting to play Hamlet.”
There is, in fact, a considerable and attractive repertory of authentic
Schickele: a musical version of the old play “The Knight of the Burning
Pestle,” large-scale pieces that pit rock or bluegrass bands against symphony
orchestras, songs and chamber music, and the much-admired score to the sci-fi
film classic “Silent Running.” The very next night after the P.D.Q. Bach
farewell, in fact, April 2, Schickele appears as pianist, with the Armadillo
String Quartet, in a program of his chamber music at Mount St. Mary’s College
in Brentwood.
And then? Schickele ticked off a larger-than-life agenda: a radio series to be
called “Schickele Mix” (“a little bit of everything that happens to interest
me at the moment”), a television series for children, a possible movie project
on the life of P.D.Q. (Aha! There goes that sabbatical!), chamber concerts by
“Peter Schickele and Friends” on a barge under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even if he wanted to, Hamlet isn’t going to have the time to play the clown.
Not for a while, anyhow.
SIDEBAR:
“I’m not making this up, you know!” shrieks Anna Russell in the middle of her
famous retelling of the story of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” at
the point where the hero Siegfried meets the first woman he has ever seen who
isn’t one of his aunts. The point, which Russell superbly establishes, is that
you don’t have to make things up to extract music’s quotient of hilarity. All
you have to do is to tell the truth — somewhat selectively, of course.
Russell, London-born and now retired, enchanted audiences for years with the
thrust and the wisdom of her musical observations. Her persona was the
lecturer, with her talks garishly illustrated from the piano. Like Schickele,
she was awesomely accurate in her parodies and pastiches: a whole Verdi opera
based on “Hamlet,” a program of mock Schubert lieder (with the deathless
observation that singers of German songs, like cheese, are only good when
they’ve properly rotten).
Russell’s records, taken from live performances and therefore sometimes
blotted out by laughter and applause, are a priceless legacy — or would be, if
they were still in the catalog. There is, however, a splendid video of a
complete Russell recital, including the Wagner.
Records of the Hoffnung Festival, once on EMI-Angel, also seem to be out of the
catalog, a situation best described as unconscionable. The late Gerald Hoffnung
was a conductor, tuba player, cartoonist and humorist who assembled several
elaborate music festivals, with contributions by major composers, to explore in
depth music’s lunatic fringe — again, with deadly accuracy.
What if, a Hoffnung piece asks, the offstage trumpet in Beethoven’s Third
“Leonore” Overture kept chiming in in the wrong place, and then missed his
proper entrance? What about the “1812” played by an ensemble of baroque
instruments? The Hoffnung treasures include the absolute last word on
Schoenbergian 12-tone music, a piece in which the climax is a measure of
silence, notated in 3/4 time, to “impart a quasi-Viennese flavor.” Wise,
accurate and hilarious, Hoffnung never had to make anything up, either.