Before the Canon, Pachelbel was a family friend and teacher to the Bachs
Today Johann Pachelbel is remembered almost entirely for one piece, the Canon in D. In his own time he was a celebrated organist who taught Johann Sebastian Bach's eldest brother, stood godfather to a Bach daughter, and possibly met the nine-year-old Johann Sebastian at a family wedding in 1694.
Baptised in Nuremberg in 1653, the son of a wine dealer, he impressed teachers early. Money troubles forced him out of the University of Altdorf within a year, but a Regensburg school admitted him above its usual quota on a scholarship. By 1673 he was deputy organist at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, the Habsburg capital, where five years of Italian and Catholic music shaped his lucid, uncluttered style, even though he himself was Lutheran.
In 1677 he became court organist at Eisenach, the home town of Johann Ambrosius Bach, and grew close to the family, tutoring the children. A court mourning period left him jobless a year later, carrying a testimonial calling him a perfect and rare virtuoso. At Erfurt's Predigerkirche from June 1678 he spent 12 years building his name as a leading German organ composer. His contract required chorale preludes for services and a major new work each year, each expected to outshine the one before. His first wife and their only son died of plague in October 1683, and his first publication that year was a set of variations titled Musical Thoughts on Death.
He remarried in 1684 and had seven children; two sons became organ composers, one of them settling in the American colonies in 1734, and a daughter, Amalia, won recognition as a painter and engraver. Pachelbel moved to Stuttgart in 1690, fled French attacks two years later, and served as town organist in Gotha, turning down offers from Stuttgart and from Oxford University.
Nuremberg wanted him back so badly that in 1695 it offered him the St. Sebaldus post without the usual audition. There he published the Hexachordum Apollinis in 1699, six keyboard arias with variations dedicated to Buxtehude. He died at 52 and was buried on 9 March 1706.
Source: Johann Pachelbel
