Peter Schickele (2024-1935)?

[cahn]

Peter Schickele died yesterday, at the age of 88. He was a composer in his own right, but I at least knew him primarily as the man behind P.D.Q. Bach, (1807–1742)? "the twenty-first of Johann [Sebastian Bach]'s twenty children," the composer of many hilarious musical parodies.

I was introduced to Peter Schickele / P.D.Q. Bach by the orchestra kids I hung out with freshman year of college (L, T, and F) -- it was L who made me sit down and listen to the 1712 Overture, clearly taking great delight in introducing a newbie to it. I went to listen to it tonight in honor of Peter Schickele and was so charmed to find that there is a live performance of the 1712 Overture on Youtube. (Non-Americans might benefit from listening to the tunes of Yankee Doodle and Pop Goes the Weasel first.) I also love Schickele's Eine Kleine Nichtmusik, which he did have under his own name.

I introduced D to P.D.Q. Bach when we were dating, and when I told him the news of his death, D said, "They should perform the Missa Hilarious at his funeral." RIP, you gave laughter to a lot of people. <3

Comments

[landofnowhere]

I grew up with his eclectic NPR radio show Schickele Mix (tagline, "if it sounds good, it is good"). Sad to hear of his passing, but good to know that I'm not grieving alone.

[cahn]

oh, I didn't grow up with this but I just spent a while listening to an episode online, this is great <3

[landofnowhere]

:-D I listened to a bunch of them some years ago, and while I don't enjoy the dad jokes as much as I did when I was 12, they still hold up pretty well! (There were a couple episodes on women and music that didn't hold up so much -- "Masculine/Feminine" ends with a rant about feminist musicology, while "Cherchez la Femme", though it features women composers, I mainly remember for the cameo with Bill Clinton playing the saxophone and the final gag about how Garrison Keillor is more popular than Schickele (this was made in 1996, I kinda want to know what Schickele was thinking?). I should listen to more sometime, I see there are more available online now than there used to be!

[cahn]

Haha, he sure does love his dad jokes. I bet I would have eaten that up when I was twelve, too. (Huh -- that makes me think I should listen to these with the resident 13- and 8-year-olds, who would probably be all over the jokes.) I will keep that in mind about the women-and-music episodes, thanks for the warning!

[primeideal]

Links are delightful, thank you! :)

[cahn]

You are welcome! I'm happy to spread more P.D.Q. Bach love :D

[seekingferret]

Schickele Mix was a staple of my childhood and one of the ways I fell in love with classical music. Thanks for sharing your memories.

[cahn]

<3 I wish I'd had Schickele Mix in my childhood! (But I'm making up for it by listening to it right now :) )

[isis]

Aw, man, I loved his stuff. Thanks for sharing this information.

[cahn]

<3 I'm glad to find others who loved his music <3

[thistleingrey]

I didn't follow his work but remember with some glee the bits I've heard. Thanks for the links!

[cahn]

<3 For a while I bought CDs of his whenever I came across them (which wasn't all that often, in the days when we actually had to buy things in physical music stores!) -- but I admit I hadn't kept up with his work for a while :)

[zdenka]

Oh, I'm sorry to hear it! I hope he knew he brought joy to a great many people.

[cahn]

I hope so too! <33

[brainwane]

My spouse and I both grew up with Schickele Mix. In fact, my spouse just launched a fan archive project spurred by Schickele's death.

[cahn]

Ohhhh this is really cool, thank you for the link!!

Eugene Onegin

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I'm not actually sure whether it's better to thread-necro the latest music post or just use the DM function, so let me know the etiquette here. Anyway, we saw Eugene Onegin last night and it was really good! I think I mentioned that this is maybe the second opera I've ever seen, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I liked the text-setting: the way people keep singing almost-but-not-quite in time, converging on rare points of agreement just where they shouldn't (nyet! nyet!). And the scraps of Russian folk music that Tchaikovsky uses as motifs throughout were really interesting. Tanya rejecting Onegin's profession of love at the end is almost liturgical in places.

The producer had "older Tanya" remembering the story, watching everything silently from the back of the stage. Every so often, she would walk into the scene and try to change something, but in vain of course.

This is one of your fandoms, isn't it? What's your take on it?

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cahn]

Hi hiiiii! I am SO pleased you liked Onegin! I suppose I'm in the fandom, if by that you mean have both requested and written fic for exchanges :) in fact I blame this opera in particular for my falling headlong into opera fandom in general, as I read a prompt for it, liked it, saw the Met recording of Fleming/Hvorotovsky's Onegin while writing for it, and then went on to watch Hvorotovsky in a bunch more stuff including Verdi, which sealed my fate. (Before that I'd watched some opera, mostly Mozart and Die Nibelungen, but hadn't really fallen in love yet.)

I absolutely love that "nyet! nyet!" section, it's my favorite heartbreaking bit. I adore all the duets/trios/quartets in this opera -- my favorite thing in opera in general is how you can have several people singing their own different lines and thinking different things (or, in the "nyet!" bit, the same thing, even). (Have you watched Amadeus, where Tom Hulce's Mozart talks about this in relation to Figaro?) And I feel that Onegin is kind of special in the sense of, at least in part, setting a poetic and novelistic text (as opposed to trying to just tell an over-the-top dramatic story, like Carmen or Tosca or something -- I suppose Figaro and Barber are Beaumarchais, but they're in a different language than their source!), which I feel makes it a bit more naturalistic and psychologically interesting than many of those ~dramatic~ operas. (I saw Carmen for the first time last fall and honestly didn't like it that much as an opera, though of course I love the instrumental music.)

Tanya rejecting Onegin's profession of love at the end is almost liturgical in places.

Oh, huh! I hadn't thought about it in those terms before, and yes, that's very interesting!

That sounds like an interesting production, too! I saw one (on video) that was a bit like that, with both Onegin and Tanya as their older selves, which I think did not work as well as it would have with just one of them.

What's your take on it?

Ha, besides that Onegin is a real jerk? :) And that he and Tanya have a lot of chemistry? :) And that I have rather a fondness for Gremin (this is opera, the bar's on the floor, but Onegin somehow still can't clear it, and Gremin can), and have the headcanon that she figures out how to fall in love with him properly after the events of the opera? :) (I have fannish thoughts, okay :D )

SPEAKING of my post-canon headcanon, now that you have watched this you have to read my amazing gift in Pushkin sonnets (!!) where I prompted "Tatyana's cute zombie pumpkin pal helps her get over Onegin and fall properly in love with Gremin! Or something. :)" And I got another lovely fill for post-canon Tatyana/Gremin when I asked for it again a few years later! :D

I guess I will also link my fics that I wrote for categranger, AU Evgeny/Tanya where he eventually figures out how not to be such a jerk, which I also ship :D

(I like it when you comment on old posts! I tend to use DMs just for stuff where I figure the other person and/or I might not want it to be public.)

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I will go read all those fics (sometime soon but not now). They sound great!

I have to say, I also liked Gremin, but I don't think Onegin completely fails to clear the bar. He could absolutely seduce Tanya and dump her, or use the letter as leverage to marry her even though he doesn't love her. He doesn't--- he rejects her in a jerkish way, tells her that other men might, and walks off. Given that her mom and her nanny both try to warn Tanya that the marriage market was not so much about love as about finding a safe place and not having a whole lot of agency, and that Tanya is too naive to understand what they're saying, it's actually kind of decent of Onegin to provide her a safe space to fail.

It's been a long time since I read *A Hero of Our Time*, but as far as I can remember, Pechorin seduces women he doesn't love at least twice. (He is explicitly meant to be "Onegin, but worse"--- he's even named after a Siberian river, just as Onegin is, to make sure you get it.) I'm not sure if you'll have read this book, by the way. It's about another "superfluous man" wandering around the unpleasant edges of Russian imperialism with no concern for himself or anyone else--- makes you wonder what Onegin did in his time "traveling around".

I do think having only older Tanya makes much more sense than having both of them--- it was clear in the production that it was meant to be her memory of what happened. I think they staged it that way partly to make sense of the time skips, but it worked dramatically as well.

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cahn]

Oh, yeah, no, you're right, Onegin could be a lot worse and I'm glad you reminded me of that! (Which is why I ship them if Onegin ever got his act together, which I wouldn't do otherwise.) I agree with you that he acted in a reasonably decent way in Act I, even if he could have phrased it a little better. And that's the tragedy of it -- that yeah, he can be a real jerk and he can be a terrible friend and he would probably be a worse boyfriend, and even when he's not trying to be a jerk or a terrible friend he has poor communication skills -- but he's also got some decency to him (not least recognizing that he would be a terrible boyfriend), and like you say he doesn't take advantage of Tanya like he could have, and all of his negative qualities are pretty common immature issues that one could grow out of. Only he wrecks everything before he can grow out of it. :( (And I mean, I was a jerk-not-great-at-relationships-horrible-communication-skills teenager once too, with hopefully less collateral damage in my wake because dueling's not a thing any more. I think Onegin's a bit older than his teens in Act I/II but he's still a chaotic adolescent at heart.)

In the Met version I saw on video, there's a bit right after the party disaster where Tatyana and Onegin just look at each other for a moment, and he's just got this look like that is not what I meant at all, but it's too late then...

I have not read A Hero of Our Time, and it sounds like the sort of book where I probably should have read it earlier in life as I have much less patience with that kind of thing now, lol! (Although it does remind me that I'm pretty sure book!Onegin also had numerous flings with ladies he didn't particularly love before he moved to the country, though iirc it was not so much his seducing them as everyone just sort of being bored in the city.)

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I suspect A Hero of Our Time would probably annoy you, yeah. I honestly kind of want to read it again... I think when I read it (as a teenager), I was interested in the self-destructiveness of the protagonist on a personal level, but now I think I'd be more curious about Russian imperialism and how they let a generation of Pechorins and Onegins loose in the Caucasus and Siberia--- a kind of counterpoint to the American old west, I guess, but a generation earlier. I too am glad that my teens were set in an era of acting out through emo music and bad poetry rather than freely available guns, strong liquor and a code of never saying sorry for anything.

I suspect Hamsterwoman has read all this stuff in Russian... many Russians I have known have very good literary educations, and strong opinions about Pushkin!

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I went back and read it again... Pechorin is absolutely awful and you would hate him. The book begins with his paying an Ossetian boy to abduct his sister (she's pretty, but he does it mostly out of spite for the local man who has been wooing her). He keeps the girl as a concubine for four months (she's not technically his slave, but has been "ruined" and is utterly dependent on him). Then he loses interest in her and she dies. In the final chapter, he throws over both the girl he's been flirting with to make his rival jealous, and the woman whose marriage he has ruined and whom he might actually love. In between, he is just a horrible person to absolutely everyone.

Having watched Dune II over the weekend, I find myself drawing a strange connection to Chani--- the Fremen are partly based on the Caucasian Muslims, and the movie centers her character a lot more than the book does. Movie!Chani is a lot clearer about what sort of relationship she wants, which introduces a conflict the book doesn't really have. The book ends with Jessica telling her that even though they're both concubines, "history will call us wives", and she presumably just accepts that. (As an aside, Jessica's foresight seems like it might have failed her, since Irulan is an actual historian who is implied to have written the in-universe appendices of the book.) There's a kind of theme in both books that runs something like this: "If they treat colonial women this way, might they not do the same to our women?"

I'm off to Ao3 to see if there are any good Hero of Our Time fixit fics, I suppose?

Re: Eugene Onegin

[cahn]

Ha! Lol, I know how it is -- there are plenty of things I read as a much more uncritical teen/young adult that I loved, and in fact still love based on how I remember feeling when I first read them, while realizing that if I read it for the first time as an adult I'd hate it. (Like our discussion about the Uncle Abner stories!) Part of it being age, but also part of it being that just in general we (societally speaking) weren't so aware of a lot of things being awful that now jump out at us a lot more.

(As an aside, Jessica's foresight seems like it might have failed her, since Irulan is an actual historian who is implied to have written the in-universe appendices of the book.)

Oh interesting -- I never thought of it that way, that Irulan being the one who's literally writing the history might mean that history wouldn't, in fact, call them wives. (Which even when I first read it as an uncritical adolescent I thought was a terrible last line!) Now I want a (possibly AU?? found-document??) hatred-to-friendship fic about Irulan and Chani, where Irulan and Chani plot against each other and Irulan writes propaganda against Chani but eventually they come to an understanding... and then what? Irulan pivots to writing Muad'Dib history where only Paul is mentioned, and spends the rest of her time writing hot F/F where Paul never shows up, and it turns out those are the bestsellers? Extra bonus points if that changes history? IDK, I don't know how this would end, but I want it :D

(I should save these notes on what I want for Yuletide -- come Sept/Oct, I'm always caught flat-footed and am all "I can't think of anything I want!")