CLASSICAL MUSIC : Seriously Now, It’s Not Easy Being the Funster of Fugue

Peter Schickele is the 20th Century’s preeminent case of musical schizophrenia: two distinct composers forced to inhabit the same person.

The serious Schickele turns out commissions with respectable titles such as String Quartet No. 3, “Monochrome VI” and “Dream Dances” for flute, oboe and cello. The other Schickele--who uses the name P.D.Q. Bach--pens works named Schleptet in E-flat Major, the “Unbegun” Symphony, “Fuga Meshuga” and a full-length opera titled “The Abduction of Figaro.”

“The only problem with having two personalities is that some people don’t know that I do serious stuff,” Schickele complained. “Not too long ago, I learned that a performing group applied to a foundation for a grant to commission a work from me. They were turned down because the foundation said that P.D.Q. Bach was too commercial. Even when the group informed the foundation that Peter Schickele also wrote serious music, they were still unwilling to award the grant.”

That P.D.Q. Bach is a commercial success, however, is beyond argument. Over the past 15 years, this completely mythical son of J. S. Bach (whose more famous composer offspring are also universally known by their initials, such as C.P.E., J.C.F. and W.F.) has captured the American market on musical parody. This Friday and Saturday at Symphony Hall, the San Diego Symphony will perform a pair of concerts devoted to some of the more immortal works of P.D.Q. Bach, including the famous version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony narrated as a sportscast (KSDO-AM sports director Ron Reina will assist in this taxing intellectual feat), “Chaconne a son Gout” and Variations on “An Unusually Simple-Minded Theme” for piano and orchestra.

On the podium will be yet another Schickele persona, Professor Peter Schickele, the conductor and musicologist who has “discovered” the lost oeuvre of P.D.Q. Bach. Of course, the real Schickele is not really a professor.

“Well, it is hard to prove my credentials at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople,” Schickele admitted when pressed by a skeptical reporter. “But I taught at Juilliard in the early 1960s,” he protested. Although the non-professor’s university is as bogus as P.D.Q. Bach--whose dates are always given as (1807-1742)?--Hoople is quite real.

“Yes, there really is a Hoople, a town of 400 located northwest of Grand Forks, North Dakota, near the Canadian border. Once, when I played a concert in Grand Forks, I was presented with the key to the city by the mayor of Hoople.” No doubt the key opened both doors there.

Schickele attributes his primary inspiration to the American musical humorist Spike Jones.

“I was introduced to the recordings of Spike Jones at the age of 9 or 10. In fact, my brother and I would lip-sync his records and even did this as entertainment for Kiwanis Club lunches.” He also credits as influential the early recordings of England’s zany Hoffnung Festival.

Schickele’s earliest forays into the strange world of P.D.Q. Bach occurred during his college years, while he was at home in North Dakota.

“In the summer of 1953, I was home from Swarthmore College, where I was a student. Some friends and I were fooling around with tape recorders, and three of us made a recording of one of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos. They played all the strings parts, and I played all the wind parts on bassoon two octaves too low, something that sounded rather like mud wrestling. The next week I came up with a piece called the ‘Sanka’ Cantata. Although I don’t clearly remember whose idea the name P.D.Q. Bach was, my buddie Ernie Lloyd’s mother claims her son came up with it.”

When Schickele taught at Juilliard, he and his colleagues would give an annual concert of his musical parodies under the baton of Jorge Mester. In 1965, Schickele made his professional debut as P.D.Q. Bach at New York’s Town Hall, and the rest is demented history.

If Schickele is known for his pun-filled titles, crude sight gags and on stage pratfalls, he is quick to point out the serious craft behind his P.D.Q. Bach compositions.

“For all its ineptness,” he said, “the secret weapon in my P.D.Q. Bach writing is solid construction and musical ideas interesting enough for someone to listen a second and third time. After all, once you know the punch line, you know the joke. A P.D.Q. Bach piece needs more than a good joke to make it.”

Strong, silent type. Romanian pianist Radu Lupu will play a recital at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Civic Theatre, but the reclusive musician refuses to be interviewed or cooperate with the usual promotional gambits. Winner of the 1966 Van Cliburn piano competition (and a slew of others), Lupu has an impressive list of recordings, including all the Beethoven piano concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.

Two weeks ago, a music critic for the Baltimore Sun tricked Lupu into giving a short interview under the ruse that Lupu’s upcoming University of Maryland recital had been turned into a benefit for Romanian relief.

“There’s no mystery about me--I don’t like to be interviewed because I don’t like to talk about myself,” the 44-year-old pianist told the Sun critic. “A musician should not have to be sold as if he were toothpaste. I would rather have 300 people come to hear the music than have a crowd of 3,000 who have been seduced by publicity to come hear a ‘stage personality.’ ”

According to officials at the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Lupu’s local sponsor, they would rather have 3,000 people in Civic Theatre to hear Lupu for any reason whatsoever. No questions asked.

Dialogue on the “Dialogues.” Conductor Richard Bonynge and San Diego Opera’s music administrator, Karen Keltner, will discuss Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” in the Beverly Sills Salon at Civic Theatre at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. The local company’s popular lecture series precedes each production of the season with an informative preview. (This Poulenc production opens Feb. 10.) Bonynge, who knew Poulenc, and Keltner, who studied music in France, will share their insights into the composer’s landmark contemporary opera. The opera, which was first performed in 1956, is about a religious community caught in the anti-church excesses of the French Revolution.