Peter Schickele

Peter Schickele’s “Last Tango in Bayreuth”: An Awful Lot of Bassoons

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Last Wednesday, May 22, marked the 211th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. During his lifetime, the German Romanticist became a cult-like figure, revealing magical new orchestral colors and pushing tonality and formal scale to their ecstatic limits. In contrast with Brahms the traditionalist, Wagner appeared to offer a radical new vision. Looking back on Wagner’s work, Claude Debussy more accurately described it as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” The …

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Remembering Peter Schickele, Zany Creator of “P.D.Q. Bach”

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Peter Schickele, the American composer and classical music satirist, passed away on January 16, 2024 at his home in Bearsville, New York. He was 88. Born in Ames, Iowa, Schickele was a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Juilliard School. He studied with Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. As a composer, he produced numerous symphonic, choral, and chamber works, as well as music for film and the Broadway stage. Yet, he will …

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Debussy and the “Tristan Chord”

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On Monday, we heard the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a work which opened the door to the dissolution of tonality and the atonal sound world of the twentieth century. One composer who was profoundly influenced by this music was the young Claude Debussy. In 1887, Debussy called Tristan und Isolde “the most beautiful thing I know, from the point of view of the profundity of the emotion.” Yet, in a …

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