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:
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—André Maurois (1885–1967)
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—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)