Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach
On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele (who died on January 16 at age 88) and his comical alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. It is sure to be a night of fun and puns, as the program includes P.D.Q. Bach tunes with the titles Schleptet in Eb Major, The Short-Tempered Clavier, and Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments. I spoke to Slatkin, who is conductor emeritus of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, about his late friend and long-time collaborator.
Chris King: Tell me about your personal connection to Peter Schickele, your musical interest, and why are you doing this?
Leonard Slatkin: I went to public schools all my life, and in my high school in Los Angeles we had three choruses, two bands, an orchestra, and a composer residence in high school. This is about 1961, and the composer in residence was this young man named Peter Schickele. He wrote a couple pieces for the chorus and one for the band. He seemed very interesting back then, a little bit of a hippie but a nice guy.
Flash forward a couple years, and I wind up at the Juilliard School in 1962, and there were these rumors about surprise concerts going on at the school featuring music of a composer called P.D.Q. Bach. And of course that’s a fictional name, because “P.D.Q.” stood for “pretty damn quick.” We knew these were meant to be musical parodies, and we knew that the same Peter Schickele was responsible for them. He had been a student there, a composer, and he was doing these very strange events only for a handful of people. It was decided that this was amusing enough to move into Town Hall.
It required a singer for one of the pieces which was called Cantata: Iphigenia in Brooklyn, which gives you an idea already what is going on in this stuff. Only one person came to audition, and it was Peter Schickele himself— who then didn’t get the job. He was turned down by the producers of the concert.
Peter Schickele was a composer, first and foremost. He played the bassoon and the piano as well. He had written, among other things, the music for a show back in the early sixties called O Calcutta that was a little bit like Hair, and these other sort of hippie-inspired things where it was very short, momentary flash of full nudity onstage, very shocking back in the early sixties. He wrote the music for a film called Silent Running with Bruce Dern, which was about the impact of pollution on the environment and outer space. He was part of a group called The Open Window, that combined classical music with pop genres of the time.
The success of that concert at Town Hall really put him on the map. He would appear on The Today Show; he would be on late-night chat shows. This invention of the last and least of J.S. Bach’s children was giving a kind of comedic bent to the stuffy world of classical music. Even if you didn’t know anything about classical music, you could come to these concerts and you would be rolling on the floor, because all of the references he would make to different music. At the same time he would invent instruments, all these things that were crazy. But it was very funny, and it really caught on—the public really embraced it.
When I came to St. Louis in 1968, we had this idea to do a concert at the Zoo, and we commissioned Peter to write a piece which was called A Zoo Called Earth, and at the end of the piece there was a march where many animals came out. The piece has become almost a staple of children’s concerts these days. It was also one of the first classical music pieces to deal with the environment because it had to do with an alien who comes to visit and thinks, well, if you’ll take better care of your planet, maybe we will come back and visit again.
I commissioned a symphony from Peter which we premiered in Washington. Then I would conduct for P.D.Q. Bach concerts that Peter would do around the country and many of them here. Peter would usually arrive late for the concerts, and he might come in swinging on a rope from the balcony, Tarzan-style, and then crawl his way to the stage. With this most disheveled-looking manner you could possibly imagine, he would then proceed just to totally entertain the audience.
He also had a fantastic radio show called The Schickele Mix, which, in a way, was an inspiration for me when I started doing The Slatkin Shuffle. It is based on the idea that you don’t need to categorize music. You just need to find ways to juxtapose it in both ways that work and ways that don’t. And Peter was really good at that as well.
So, this marvelous person, terrific composer, we decided, since he passed, to do a concert to honor him. So, we will be hearing music by Schickele himself, some on his serious side and some in his P.D.Q. Bach guise. It should be a very entertaining and hopefully wonderful experience for the audience and certainly for the musicians.
Chris King: So, it would suggest, given that long of an association and very frequent collaborations, you also got to know him quite well personally.
Leonard Slatkin: He was a wonderful person, very kind. We were very close friends. I loved doing music in all the guises that he appeared in.
Chris King: Tell us you know a thing or two about him as a person that maybe is not widely known, since you had this privileged relationship with him.
Leonard Slatkin: People who know him mostly from the P.D.Q. Bach world think of him as being this incredibly disheveled person with a scraggly beard, wild hair, and he would come on stage in a tails that would well looked like they had been half eaten by a dog, and yet his persona was very strict. He had a quite a penchant for perfection, and any great humor requires perfection. When you did concerts with him, the rehearsals were very intense. He was not going to let you just slough this off, because if it was not done properly, the impact would not be the same. It needed to be done in a way, with all seriousness on the part of the performers, so we could not laugh. We could laugh at the rehearsal, but at the performance we had to learn how to keep our emotions in check.
I think he wanted to be taken probably a little more seriously for the non-P.D.Q. Bach works, and that still might happen, because a lot of his music will get played in both of his personas, I think.
Chris King: Is it fair to say that in the time between his emergence and now that classical music has lost some of its iconic and culturally dominant place? I mean, everyone has to know who Bach is for P.D.Q. Bach to be funny or interesting.
Leonard Slatkin: I actually don’t think so. Yeah, there are in jokes that will appeal to the people who know it and to musicians, but there is always enough in his concerts that you don’t have to know it. Just, you show up and you realize this is funny. But you may not know why. And that is okay.
Chris King: I guess I am asking is classical music no longer an easy target because …
Leonard Slatkin: People don’t know it. You are 100 percent right. So, a lot of the puns, a lot of the jokes get lost on some people. I don’t know exactly how this particular program we’re doing is being marketed. But I would hope that people who are not necessarily looped into the so-called classical music world will find out about it and say, Hey, this looks like something interesting, and maybe it will draw in a new audience.
Chris King: Such a long career, such a prolific composer, and two composers in one. What were your principles of selection for choosing the material that you’re going to perform?
Leonard Slatkin: Variety. I wanted to make sure that Peter was represented with some of his works that are non P.D.Q. Bach, which still have his own distinctive style, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that the event was entertaining. So, you’re going to get a good combination of the more serious side of Peter, but coupled along with this amusing side. However, Peter’s not with us anymore. He was always the host for his own concerts. So that role now follows to me. So, I have to try to emulate his style and his substance at the performance.
Chris King: Will we see you in a ratty tuxedo?
Leonard Slatkin: No, no, no. I could, though. I used to have a dog who chewed up half of my tails. I almost walked onstage not realizing it had happened. It’s too bad I don’t have it anymore. Otherwise, I would have done it. But I don’t have the scraggly beard, and I don’t have the wild hair. I don’t have that much hair left, anyway. But no. Although I might make an entrance a little bit late. That’s a cute idea.
Chris King: But probably not a Tarzan act, I don’t think.
Leonard Slatkin: No, I might try to slide up on the stage. We’ll see. Look, I’m 80, so there are things I don’t do anymore.
Chris King: Yeah, it’s possible to forget your age, given your liveliness.
Leonard Slatkin: Yeah, you know, I kind of don’t want to kill myself, really.
D.BachL will be performed 7:30 p.m. Monday, November 25 at the 560 Music Center. For more information, visit https://chambermusicstl.org.
