By the least of the sons of J.S. Bach

...courtesy of Professor Peter Schickele of the University of Eastern North Dakota at Hoople, the world's foremost expert on that afterthought of an offspring, P.D.Q. Bach:



Quoth Wikipedia:

P. D. Q. Bach was born in Leipzig on May 5, 1807 at age 65, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach; the twenty first of Johann's twenty children. According to Schickele, Bach's parents did not bother to give their youngest son a real name, and settled on "P. D. Q." instead. The only earthly possession Johann Sebastian Bach willed to his son was a kazoo.

In 1755, P. D. Q. Bach was an apprentice of the inventor of the musical saw, Ludwig Zahnstocher (German for "toothpick"). In 1756, P. D. Q. Bach met Leopold Mozart and advised him to teach his son Wolfgang Amadeus how to play billiards. Later on P. D. Q. Bach went to St. Petersburg to visit his distant cousin Leonhard Sigismund Dietrich Bach (L. S. D. Bach), whose daughter Betty Sue bore P. D. Q. a child.

Finally, in 1770, P. D. Q. Bach started to write music, mostly by stealing melodies from other composers.

P. D. Q.'s final words, which were spoken to Betty-Sue Bach, were "Time, gentlemen." The time was exactly eleven o'clock on the evening of April 1, 1742 in Baden-Baden-Baden, Germany.

P. D. Q. Bach's grave was marked "1807–1742".

P. D. Q. Bach's Epitaph reads [as requested by his cousin Betty Sue Bach and written by the local doggerel catcher]:

In the "original" German:

Hier liegt ein Mann ganz ohnegleich;
Im Leibe dick, an Sünden reich.
Wir haben ihn in das Grab gesteckt,
Weil es uns dünkt er sei verreckt.

Translated:

Here lies a man with sundry flaws
And numerous Sins upon his head;
We buried him today because
As far as we can tell, he's dead.

Among the notable other works of P.D.Q. Bach are Wachet Arf (Sleeping Dogs, Awake!), The Unbegun Symphony, and Fanfare for the Common Cold.