The solemn rituals that attend classical music have long made the genre an irresistible target for mockery, most of it obvious and crass. From time to time, though, a knowing insider produces a satire of classical pretensions that approaches the sublime. The honor roll of great put-ons includes Anna Russell’s impression of a vocal recitalist in majestic decline; Gerard Hoffnung’s decimations of mid-twentieth-century British concert life; Victor Borge’s Dada take on the itinerant piano virtuoso; and, of course, Peter Schickele’s anarcho-Baroque incarnation of P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), who is habitually described as the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children, and also the oddest. P.D.Q. made his public début in 1965, at Town Hall; fifty years on, Schickele, adopting his familiar guise as a professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, returns to the scene of the original crime.

Every master parodist must have mastery of the art under attack. Schickele brings to bear consummate skill as a composer and an instantly recognizable musical voice. Much of the pleasure of the P.D.Q. pieces—“Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” “The Stoned Guest,” and “Wachet Arf!” are typical titles—comes from their combination of the risible and the hummable: you’re never quite sure whether P.D.Q. was an incompetent composer or a visionary one, his malfunctioning-sewing-machine textures interlaced with touches of bluegrass, minimalism, and rock and roll. At times, the ingenuity of the jokes is breathtaking: in Schickele’s “Quodlibet,” themes from the nine Beethoven symphonies are piled on top of one another, all sharing a tonic-dominant progression. Which is not to say that Schickele is ever in danger of being excessively refined. The jokes go low; the puns border on the wretched. Little about the anniversary concert, on Dec. 28, can be predicted except that the host will make his traditional entrance swinging from a rope.

The comic fame of P.D.Q. has inevitably overshadowed Schickele’s serious output. His Bassoon Concerto appears on “Full Moon in the City,” a new recording from the Oberlin Music label—one that also contains bassoon-and-ensemble works by Augusta Read Thomas, Libby Larsen, and Russell Platt, a colleague here at The New Yorker. Witty, elegant, concise, and affecting, the concerto shows Schickele as a latter-day Haydn. He is the one American composer whose name makes everyone smile. ♦