The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach – Peter Schickele

Somehow I managed to miss out on PDQ Bach when younger, but having recently heard his ‘1712 Overture’ and his ‘Unbegun Symphony’, I bought the book.  It’s a very clever biography, a, if will, “baroqueumentary” about the last (“and most definitely the least”) of JS Bach’s 21 children.

No pun is avoided, no potential joke is missed, and it is all put together brilliantly. Even the forced jokes work. (PDQ is apprenticed to a chap who amazed the locals by playing the musical saw while dancing jigs.  When the astonished audience finally worked out how he did it, a newspaper headline followed: “Jig-saw puzzle solved”.  The chap could only play the saw in one key, though.  Obviously it was a ‘C-saw’.)

The musical jokes are clever and most unexplained.  PDQ wrote a harpsichord piece where the stave for the left hand curves up and crosses over the stave for the right hand.  The joke is that this “invertible counterpoint” actually makes no difference at all to the sound of the music.  This is a nod to the ‘Musical Offering’ by JS Bach, where he doesn’t some utterly astounding things with countermelodies to the royal theme provided by Frederick the Great of Prussia.  My favourite is the Crab Canon, where Bach continues and extends the melody.  The melody works when played backwards.  It also works if you play the forward and the backward version simultaneously.  As I say – astounding.  In other movements the melody can be played as normal and at half-speed simultaneously.  This sort of thing possibly influenced PDQ Bach to create a piano sonata which, when turned upside down and reflected in a mirror, is actually a Mozart sonata. 

Piano duets with two performers playing the same instrument are often described as being for “Piano – 4 hands”.  PDQ Bach wrote the only known Sonata for Viola – 4 hands, featuring two people playing the same viola.  Genius!  Other works include Fanfare for the Common Cold, the Toot Suite, and the Canine Cantata: Wachet Arf!.  By far the most excruciating (no mean feat, given some of his other compositions) is the Pervertimento for bagpipes, bicycle and balloons (and string orchestra).

The genius continues into the appendices, where a Two-part Contraption (JS wrote lots of two-part inventions) is given a formal analysis. This is brilliantly done and features utter rubbish presented as if genuine (reminds me of some of my A-level analysis essays).  A phrase lasting a single bar is played in canon and then repeated in different octaves.  When the ‘theme’ is played at the fifth, it is treated as a new theme (because it only features two notes from the original theme), the ‘modulation’ of the piece having occurred during a beat’s rest. 

Genius writing.  Lots of fun to read.  Probably works best if you know a bit about classical music and/or about JS Bach.

(PS the line about the “Baroqueumentary” is mine, not from the book.  Best thing I have ever written, I suspect.)