In Memoriam: Peter Schickele

 

Curmie won’t get an obituary in the NYT,
but he hopes he’ll at least get an
equivalent photo to this one.

One of the first things Curmie read this morning on his Facebook feed was the news that Peter Schickele had died at the age of 88.  To be honest, it never occurred to me that he was still with us; I hadn’t heard anything about him in years, and I’d always assumed that he was at least a dozen years older than he actually was.

He had, of course, stayed on my mind.  Beloved Spouse and I often refer not infrequently to the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and I’ve more than occasionally wished I could have worked there—their theatre program didn’t have the reputation of their music program, but the school clearly appreciated the arts.  😉

More to the point, Schickele was instrumental in forming my attitude towards life in general in ways I hadn’t really thought about until this morning.  He was, of course, a gifted musician—he wrote over a hundred pieces of serious music: for symphonies, for Broadway, for Hollywood—but, like Victor Borge and Spike Jones (both of whom were more beloved of Curmie’s parents than of Curmie), he gained fame more for his wit and cheerful irreverence than for his composing or playing.

Still, the musicianship was there.  Schickele’s “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, the “last and by far the least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manifold offspring, clicked in Curmie’s mind in a particularly impactful way.  In a memorial tribute in the New York Times, Margalit Fox writes, “Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.”  That’s about right, both denotatively and tonally.

The “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” in particular struck a chord early on with Curmie, one of whose clearest memories of childhood was eating at a Horn and Hardart automat during a class trip to New York City sometime in the mid-’60s.  You have to be good to write the serious part of that piece; you have to be more than a little off-center to write (and perform) the rest, complete with such “musical instruments” as glass sliding doors with sandwiches behind them.  It meant something different to Curmie at first hearing, but now it is an emphatic reminder that Art can be… well… fun.

That combination—the clear understanding of the form and the willingness to play with it—is what was, and is, so appealing.  Can Curmie’s scholarly interest in adaptations of Greek tragedy be traced to “Iphigenia in Brooklyn”?  Probably not.  But Schickele’s saucy approach to inherited material certainly planted a seed.  Curmie loves word play, although he’s not quite the punster that some of his friends are.  Peter Schickele was one of the first to inspire that appreciation.  But it’s more than just plays on words.

Over the years, Curmie developed a repertoire of bits that re-occurred in his classes.  The Athenian politician Solon had the voice of a Good Ol’ Boy when warning that make-believe might find its way into “our serious bidness.”  Apollo sounded like Barry White when propositioning Cassandra, but was utterly fabulous when appearing as the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Orestes.  The possibility that a gunpowder-based bomb might have been implanted into a straw dummy when the title character’s body was “rejected by the earth” (launched by an underground catapult) in the Cornwall Death of Pilate became “’splodin’ P-Square.”  Hamlet was caught in the existential crisis of whether to be Goth or Emo.  And so on.

Importantly, the playfulness inherent in these performances was intended (and, one hopes, received) not as an attempt to ridicule the sources, but rather to provide a hermeneutic access to them.  Irreverence for its own sake is always smug and usually boring.  But, as such philosophers as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have demonstrated, play, or rather a particular kind of play of which these snippets of pedagogical quirkiness are examples, is central not merely to our intellectual life, but to our humanity.  Huizinga even suggests that our species would more rightly be called homo ludens, replacing the Latin word for wisdom (sapiens) with the word for play.

Would Curmie’s lectures have been fundamentally different were it not for Peter Schickele?  Probably not, but it’s possible.  It’s even possible that there would have been no lectures at all, that without having developed a taste for the slightly naughty intellectual irreverence he found first in Schickele and later in the theatre, Curmie would have continued in the pre-law program he began as an undergrad.  He would then have been considerably richer.  And immeasurably poorer.