Nine Lives 9: Bach - P.D.Q. Bach!

Our book today, alas, is The Definitive Life of P. D. Q. Bach (1807 – 1742?) by the extremely estimable Professor Peter Schickele of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and it’s the only vaguely authoritative account of the life, career, and bar tabs of the last – and most certainly the least – of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children (none was odder, either). J.S. Bach developed a deep antipathy toward “the boy” (his initials are simply random letters, his father claiming he’d already used up all the ‘good’ names on his previous children) and a marked dislike of his career, even though he died while P.D.Q. was only eight. That death was commemorated in a print helpfully provided by the author, along with this description:

When P. D. Q. was eight years old, his father died. This picture of Johann Sebastian going up to heaven was done by an eyewitness to the event, who said that the sky was filled with “the most glorious music, as if God himself were playing upon the great Organ of the Cosmos, and really playing up a storm, too.” The following month a eulogy appeared in the official publication of the Guild of Church Musicians, The Organ Organ, expressing the “deeply felt” sentiments of” each and every” member of the guild: “That Sebastian Bach was the King of Instruments there can be no denying and we must all experience the pang of his passing. We must not, however, cease to strive for the lofty ideals that continued to inspire him as long as he was (as the expression is among organists) alive and kicking; life must, and no doubt will, go on. Although the world has lost a great musician, it has gained a vacancy: applications are now being accepted by the Leipzig Town Council.

P.D.Q .never received anything in the way of an education; indeed, even as a small baby, he was generally too lazy to cry, and that laziness stood him in good stead for the rest of his life. Even though the composer took several vows of abstinence from the craft of music (his first was at age three), he kept responding to the hog-calls of his Muse, and in between titanic drinking bouts, a body of work began to take shape. “Many great composers,” Professor Schickele reminds us, “were ignored during their own lifetime, but P. D. Q. Bach stands out as a monument to ignorance.”

That monument has several sections – including the Initial Plunge (“The period during which P. D. Q. Bach learned all that he ever learned about the craft of musical composition; it lasted about six days”), the Soused Period (exhibiting “excruciating je ne sais quoi”), and the Contrition Period (during which he was plagued with a hangover that lasted well after his death and is calculated to have a half-life of over one hundred and forty years) – have been carefully documented by Professor Schikele despite several professional obstacles. One of these obstacles has always been the institutional disdain shown by his colleagues, who’ve demonstrated “an enthusiastic lack of interest” (as he stiffly puts it at one point, “The often-expressed opinion of Dr. Olaf Johansen of the U. of S.N.D. that ‘P. D. Q. Bach’s scores, like children, should be seen and not heard,’ is not shared by the author”), a disdain, it must be noted, that was widely, indeed universally, felt in P. D. Q. Bach’s own day.



This antiphony most certainly included members of his own celebrated family. When P.D.Q. Bach applied for the position of Temporary Substitute Assistant Organist at St. Jezebel’s Cathedral in Haymarket, his own brother Johan Christian Bach wrote a long anti-recommendation which concludes, one might say, molto agitato:

… a person so unworthy of the name Bach that his very existence must be consider’d an Affront to Taste. I am convinc’d that allowing this person to exhibit his Skills, if such indeed they may be call’d, would be for the worthy recipients of this epistle not merely a Waste of Time, but in sooth an almost criminal Misuse of Time, so little of which is allotted to us here on this mortal Orb.

(Not that familial kindness ended up any better: Betty-Sue Bach, of the “Russian” Bachs, was one of the only members of the extended family to show any affection for the composer, and after his death she devoted her life to the publication of his works – for which she was burned at the stake in 1817)

P.D.Q.’s life consisted of more than drinking and eating (not much more, but still) – there are the corpi, which no serious musicologist must take into account. When we consider the “Concerto for Bassoon vs. Orchestra,” the opera “Iphigenia in Brooklyn” (S. 52, 162), the “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (“an opera in one unnatural act”), the Schleptet (S. 0), the Missa Hilarious (for which the composer was excommunicated in 1787, the only person ever to have been excommunicated on purely aesthetic grounds, and the only individual ever to be declared a mortal sin), and the “Fanfare for the Common Cold (s. 98.7)” (“Nothing whatsoever is known about this piece, so the author would like to take this opportunity to tell an amusing story he heard the other day …”), we begin to perceive that our time could be better spent.

[caption id="attachment_1051" align="aligncenter" width="197" caption="the univeristy of southern north dakota at hoople, looking south across the campus"][/caption]

And yet, Professor Schickele goes on and on, as when he describes the inspiration behind the Grossest Fugue (S. 50 % off):

Fugues have the reputation of being dry and academic, primarily due to the fact (one suspects) that your average layperson has trouble keeping track of where the subject, or theme (or subject) is; P. D. Q. Bach, however, in what can only be described as a didactic coup, solves this problem in a novel manner that cannot fail to reach even the densest layperson: he simply instructs each performer to stand up whenever he or she is playing the whatchamacallit.

Because you’ll never go broke underestimating the taste of the public (a sentiment with which Professor Schickele, one suspects, was all too familiar), P. D. Q. Bach died a wealthy man. He was buried in a sumptuous mausoleum on the outskirts of Baden-Baden-Baden – only to be re-buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the request of the Bach family.

And that would have been safely the end of the story, had it not been for the, er, singular industry of Professor Schickele, who was, um, lucky enough to uncover virtually every one of P.D.Q. Bach’s extant works, thereby unleashing them on an entirely new world. It’s not exactly history repeating itself, but it sure is history getting mighty tedious, and Schikele brings up the staggering possibility of a modern-day counterpart to his counterpoint hero:

In an article entitled “P. D. Q. Bach: Can It Happen Here?” appearing in the August 1973 issue of The Musical Hindquarterly, Professor Paul Behrer argues that one of the reassuring reasons that a P. D. Q. Bach could not flourish in twentieth-century America is the existence now of quite stringent copyright laws, and certainly the lack of such laws in eighteenth-century Germany allowed that aspect of P. D. Q. Bach’s style that has been called “manic plagiarism” to become developed to a degree that would be beyond the bounds of possibility in this day and age. As a general rule, the original passages in P. D. Q.’s music are due to his inability to remember how the piece that he was stealing from went.

Improved copyright laws seem like a mighty flimsy protection, but we’ll have to hope. On the one hand, it’s easy to say “the world isn’t ready – or willing – for another P.D.Q. Bach.” On the other hand, the 20h century saw a “composer” “produce” a “work” that consists of the orchestra sitting in silence while the audience watches, and audiences paid (and continue paying) to “hear” it. If that’s in any way artistically superior to kazoos, bullhorns, and woopee cushions, I don’t see how. Perhaps I need an unknown twig from the Bach family tree to enlighten me.

Nine Lives 8: Verdi!

Our book today is Frank Walker’s grand 1962 work The Man Verdi, in which three things happen in quick succession: he discerns that despite the mountain of primary documentation available, Verdi the actual human being (hence his book’s title) usually manages to elude his biographers, he tells us he has set his biography on a slightly different course from all the others in confident expectation of finally capturing that great composer’s essence in words, and then he, like everybody else, fails completely. In Gamito’s 1872 bust, Verdi is looking down – not in shame or in repose, but in an explicit act of evasion which Gamito was perceptive enough to preserve. Many full-dress biographies have appeared since Walker’s (that by Andrew Porter and Jane Phillips-Matz is by far the best, although it lacks the personal, erudite zeal of Walker’s prose), and all of them have likewise failed in biography’s main objective.

It will likely always feel that way, despite a plethora of facts.

Verdi was born in 1813 to poor nearly illiterate parents in Busseto in Romagna, but he was lucky enough to come under the tutelage of Antonio Barezzi, who saw his potential and trained him as best he could. Verdi went to Milan for three years of desperate poverty before returning to Busseto, where he married and had two children, became the local choir master, and settled into what could easily have been a lifetime of provincial obscurity. But during his stay in Milan he had been surrounded by the music of Donizetti and deeply impressed with the theater of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, so even in Busseto he was busily composing operas. The great houses in Milan showed only lukewarm interest in these early works, but the composer persevered and began to garner attention and commissions.

In 1838 his daughter died. In 1839 his son died. In 1840 his wife died. He wrote the expected lamentations in his letters, but he never missed his commission deadlines, and he continued to attract attention – including from the great Donizetti, who recognized a kindred genius in Verdi’s compositions.

Those compositions continued to flow from his pen, and Walker takes us scrupulously through the genesis, completion, and reception of each. The roll call seems positively unearthly (especially when coming from a composer who could make un-ironic reference to his “unimaginable laziness”): L Lombardi, I Due Foscari, Macbeth (like all the Romantics, Verdi worshipped Shakespeare), Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Simon Bocanegra, The Masked Ball, Otello, Falstaff, Aida … each a thing of such awe-inspiring beauty that it hardly seems possible they were written for money. And yet, as Walker impassively points out, this was the man who could write to a friend, “Who knows that I might not wake up one morning a millionaire! What a lovely word, with a full, lovely meaning! And how empty, in comparison, are words like ‘fame’ ‘glory’ ‘talent’ etc!”

Walker’s long book is a jam-packed compendium of letters, a torrent of them from every single person who touched on Verdi’s life in any way. His second wife Giuseppina wrote stacks and stacks of letters, as did all the various performers, backers, producers, and theater officials with whom Verdi dealt during the decades of his professional life. It’s a herculean amount of work, and Walker does it all with such lively, gossipy energy that the pages fly by. Of course Verdi himself helps with this – like almost every other Romantic composer, he spent far more time writing first-rate letters than he did writing first-rate music (it was the Internet of the day, after all). Walker uses these letters with extremely good care, and their subjects range from the deepest matter of art to the razor-sharp offhand observations the maestro seems to have made as easily as breathing:

We in Italy imagine that the English don’t love music; this is a mistake. It is said that the English know nothing but how to pay for the pleasure of hearing great artists, but that they don’t understand now anything; this is a mistake that the French have spread about and that the Italians have adopted because it’s a French idea. I say that no man pays for things he doesn’t like and which don’t give him pleasure. The English have never hissed a masterpiece. They have never received with indifference a Barber of Seville, as Rome has, or a William Tell, as Paris has, and they have never hissed an Otello, as Naples did on its first appearance.

Care is needed in the handling of any correspondence, but as Walker makes clear, the Verdi correspondence is a minefield of mis-matched dates, faulty attributions, and elaborate forgeries. No previous Verdi scholar writing in English had tackled the mess with anything like Walker’s industry and intelligence, and yet more than once in the book, the man himself questions whether or not the task he’s set himself might not be impossible:

The biographer seeks the truth. How shall he find it?
He is generally working long after the events he is describing. Although he may not be able to remember what he was doing himself on the Tuesday of the previous week, he has to convince his readers that he knows that happened between certain people, say, one hundred years earlier.

(Writing about some early letters Verdi wrote in 1844 to various Milanese ladies, Walker says, “The letters are written on Bath paper, the fashionable stationery of the day, and employ, rather clumsily, the language of gallantry. They offer infinite possibilities of misinterpretation.” The last is a great line that seems to apply to most of Verdi’s correspondence, but the reader of this particular book need have no fear)

When Verdi died in 1901, nearly half a million mourners filled the streets of Milan. The coffin looked as small as a matchbox, floated along its route on a sea of murmuring humanity. It unfolded like a pageant, and it had a pageant’s unreality. The same an be said for this biography, for all biographies of Verdi, and the reason is fairly clear – in fact, it’s a reason shared in common with all Shakespeare biographies, which would have pleased Verdi a great deal: no life of the man can possibly equal the life his works take on inside our hearts. To listen to the glories of Verdi is to wander around inside a vast cathedral of passionate voice, the like of which no other opera composer (not even my beloved Donizetti) can match. Every true opera fan has had a warm summer afternoon in which they were brought to the most cathartic tears of their life by listening to Verdi.

No mere biography can compete with that. Praise to Frank Walker for trying so hard.

Nine Lives 7: Johannes Brahms!

Our book today is a modern masterpiece, Jan Swafford’s 1997 biography of Johannes Brahms. Whole lexicons of praise have already been heaped on this book from all quarters, and justly so: it’s a virtually form-perfect example of all that biography should be. It’s thick enough to do its mighty subject justice (Brahms had an unstintingly high opinion of himself; he would almost certainly have wanted to add a few hundred pages to Swafford’s 600-page total), it’s thoroughly grounded in primary documents and sources, and it’s unapologetically opinionated.

Opinions are one of the main things I look for in a biographer, and it can be a dreary search – 20th century conventions of scholarship were heavily infected with the dry heaves of academia shortly after the Second World War, and suddenly you could hardly open a big-press biography without barking your shin on phrases like “documents make it seem likely,” or “tax returns strongly indicate.” Swafford knows his subject too well to hedge his rhetorical bets in such a way.

Brahms was born into dire poverty in 1833, and toward the end of his life he began exercising a strict and inexcusable regimen on his personal papers, destroying everything he felt future biographers need not see. The first composition we have from him was done when he was 18 – a work easily complex enough to make it likely that he wrote many, many such before it. Despite his carefully-cultivated bluff exterior, Brahms had deep sensitivities. He himself often referred to his strained and chaotic childhood and youth as dark forces shaping his adult life, and we can well believe him (the readiness with which he accepted his fame, for instance, is no doubt connected to the fact that when he was a young composer and sent some scores to Schumann for comment, they were returned unopened).

It’s tricky material to navigate – it’s a big, broad, immensely powerful life, a figure who knew perfectly well that he was last of the great composers in the old classical style. Following his subject through the mountains of documentation at his disposal can’t have been easy for Swafford – and it was certainly rendered no easier by the fact that any biographer of Brahms (just like any friend of his, while he was alive) must spend half his time sheepishly apologizing for the man’s boorish behavior.

Swafford handles it all with complete assurance. After one hour of reading this book’s fluid, knowing prose, you forget that you’ve ever read a Brahms biography by anybody else. Swafford is every bit as wry and knowing on the peripherals of Brahms’ life and times as he is on the main topics. Here’s a priceless aside on what happened when Bruckner was allowed to view the exhumed skeleton of Beethoven prior to its re-burial in Vienna’s Central Cemetery:

He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven’s bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner’s spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus. He pulled the same stunt at Schubert’s exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.

(“Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over,” Swafford helpfully informs us, “was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop”)

And of Brahms’ notorious contemporary the tone is equally informal:

As far as Brahms was concerned most of Wagner’s writings, which presaged similar tracts from generations of artists to come, were so much self-serving gobbledygook.

Brahms struck up a friendship with Liszt in 1853 (it would eventually darken, as so many of Brahms’ friendships did) and lived in Vienna for more than thirty years (he would die there in 1897), working steadily, turning out one impeccably finished masterpiece after another. More than one critic has remarked on the fact that we have no imperfect works by Brahms – each piece is finished in a way only J.S. Bach’s works ever feel finished. His mighty Violin Concerto is a triumph of forbidding complexity, and his Variations on a Theme of Paganini seems almost tauntingly to call for a Paganini of the keyboards to even attempt it.

This technical ferocity was an exponent of Brahms’ musical philosophy, which fascinates Swafford throughout his book:

There lies important and dangerous advice for Brahms’s heir in the art. Perfection before beauty, he said – perfection meaning unassailable in logic and craft, beautiful implying expressive. In preaching that ideal to a protégé Brahms exaggerated for effect; he knew nothing his perfect. But for good or ill his words echoed through the next generation of composers, some of whom did exalt thematic and harmonic logic over expressiveness (Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern were accused of that, usually wrongly. It could be argued that in lesser hands Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, which owed much to Brahms in logic and spirit, did prove amenable to pedantic elevation of logic over expressiveness.)

But there was more to it than cold method, as our biographer knows perfectly well:

Lyricism and emotion draw listeners into his music before they come to grips with the complexities – the sheer difficulty of absorbing his constant protean variation, his tonal deflections, his experiments with conventional forms. The middle-class audience loved the beauty and warmth of his music, not the logic. Surely Brahms understood that. Even if he made considerable demands on his listeners, even if he never coddled them in his big pieces, he still never forgot their feelings or his own. He made sure the warmth stayed in his work. But he would never admit it.

That warmth remained in his work and continued to invite them in (not all listeners were equally spellbound: in the 1890s the wonderfully acerbic Boston music critic Philip Hale urged a sign to be posted in the town’s new Symphony Hall saying, “Exit – in case of Brahms”) all through the composer’s life. Swafford is simply wonderful in conveying that life in all its complexity, and we’re never less than happy to have him along as our guide. Brahms was deathly afraid of seasickness, and he hated the very idea of being out of sight of land – so the orbit of his travels was comparatively narrow in comparison to the size of his fame in later life. But he kept performing for the public, and another biographer might be tempted to haul out the stock phrases of blasé praise. Swafford takes a much sharper, more insightful approach, seeking always to humanize his great subject:

From now on (after the late 1860s), as a pianist, he mainly performed his own music. Practicing bored him to distraction, and as he never tired of saying, concerts meant little to him anyway. The applause he enjoyed more than he was prepared to admit. While he generally remained competent at plowing through his own music, including the very difficult concertos, his own subtlety of touch at the keyboard gradually deteriorated to what Clara [Schumann, his shrewdest critic] bewailed as “thump, bang, and scrabble.” Still, for all that, he toured. By the 1870s he was collecting handsome fees, and his concerts not only provided income but an important means of spreading his work. Even if Brahms was not the ideal performer of his own music, as either pianist or conductor, he came up with marvelous readings sometimes, and in any case audiences showed up in force to have a look at him. So he claimed to hate performing and performed all the time, just as he hated writing letters and wrote them constantly.

“Time always treated Brahms kindly,” Swafford at one point tells us. Undeniably true, but fate has also been kind, giving him a biographer like this. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.