Biography
Schickele gives a humorous fictional biography of the composer with facts such as the following:
- P. D. Q. Bach was born in Leipzig on March 31, 1742, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach; the twenty-first of Johann's twenty children. According to Schickele, Bach's parents did not bother to give their youngest son a real name, and settled on "P. D. Q." instead. The only earthly possession Johann Sebastian Bach willed to his son was a kazoo.
- P.D.Q. attributed his frequent headaches to his having been christened in a shipyard rather than a church.
- Defined the doctrine of Originality Through Incompetence.
In preconcert lectures, Schickele joked that P. D. Q. Bach influenced Beethoven's famous deafness: Beethoven came to dread P. D. Q. Bach and his music so greatly that Beethoven resorted to stuffing coffee grounds into his ears whenever he saw P. D. Q. Bach coming.
In a running gag in Concerto for Horn and Hardart and in the introduction to Six Contrary Dances on his Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion album, Schickele inferred from fictional evidence that P. D. Q. Bach had a hollow leg that was considerably longer than the other one.
Read more about this topic: P. D. Q. Bach
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)