Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706)

Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain and Tears”, Coolio’s “CU When U Get There”, the Farm’s “Altogether Now”, and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” all have something in common, besides being Top 10 singles. They are all based on a short piece composed in the late seventeenth century, scored for three violins and keyboard. Pachelbel’s Canon in D is inescapable. It is played at weddings and funerals, on movie soundtracks, in television commercials, in malls, and in elevators. Its soothing, repetitive theme often follows the request to “Please hold.” Pachelbel’s best-known work has become muzak. It deserves better, and so does its composer.

Johann Pachelbel was born in Nuremburg, in what is now Germany, in 1653. After receiving tuition in keyboards from local teachers in Nuremburg, he entered the University of Altdorf as organist of the university’s Lorenzkirche. He left after a year for lack of money and became a scholarship student at the Gymnasium Poeticum at Regensburg. From 1673 to 1677 he was deputy organist at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. After a year as court organist at Eisenbach, he became organist at Erfurt and remained there from 1678 until 1690.

During his years at Erfurt Pachelbel gained a reputation as an outstanding organist, composer and teacher. Erfurt was the home of the Bach family, and Pachelbel’s pupils included Johann Christoph Bach, elder brother of Johann Sebastian. After losing his first wife and child in an outbreak of bubonic plague, Pachelbel married a second time and became father to a family of musicians and instrument-makers. After leaving Erfurt, he became organist for brief periods at Stuttgart and Gotha before returning to Nuremburg, where he was organist at St. Sebald’s until his death in 1706.

Pachelbel’s output was extraordinary. He composed a great many motets, arias, and masses, as well as 13 Magnificats scored for solo voices, choir, and woodwind and brass orchestra. But his most important body of work was composed for the organ, for which he wrote over 70 chorales and 95 Magnificat fugues, as well as a vast number of non-liturgical toccatas, fantasias, fugues, and preludes. The organs on which he worked were small, and his organ music tends to be small-scale and meditative, in comparison with the vast works of Buxtehude (1637–1707) and J.S. Bach (1685–1750). Nevertheless, Pachelbel was probably the largest single influence on Bach as a composer for organ – his influence as a teacher is hard to gauge, but it is without a doubt as a transmitter of what became the dominant German musical tradition that western music owes its greatest debt to Pachelbel. He also wrote a modest amount of chamber music, of which the Canon in D is by far the most remembered.

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