Sebalduskirche Organ, Nuremberg
Burkhard Mücke, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

It is unfortunate that Johann Pachelbel is today known almost solely for his 1680 composition Canon in D which, although it is an excellent piece of music, is just one of over three hundred of his surviving works. He travelled extensively across the Holy Roman Empire and became renowned as one of the greatest organists of the time.

Pachelbel was a native of the free imperial city of Nuremberg, and learned to play the organ at an early age. During his education, he began to be influenced by Italian Catholic music, despite being a Lutheran. His career began to take off in 1673 as deputy organist at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Four years later, he accepted a job as the court organist for the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach, where he met the Bach family, and a year later in 1678, moved to Erfurt, where he was the organist at Predigerkirche for twelve years. During this time, he married, though lost his wife and infant son to a plague in 1683, leading him to publish Musicalische Sterbens-Gedancken ("Musical Thoughts on Death.") Though written in a time of grief and emotional trouble, the strength of Pachelbel's faith comes through in this work's hopeful tone.

Pachelbel remarried and left Erfurt in 1690. In 1692, King Louis XIV of France invaded Württemberg and Pachelbel fled Stuttgart, escaping to a small town near Eisenach called Gotha. His fame as an organist was such at this point that his home town of Nuremberg invited him back to be the organist at Saint Sebaldus Cathedral. Pachelbel returned and held that position until his death in 1706.

One of Pachelbel's significant contributions was to push the limits of the tuning systems of his time. In the seventeenth century, musicians were attempting to solve the Pythagorean Comma by using meantone temperament, in which the 3:2 ratio of a perfect fifth is de-tuned or "tempered" slightly flat in order to achieve a purer 5:4 ratio for the major third. Although this worked within a small range of key signatures, Pachelbel's compositions like Ninety-Five Fugues on the Magnificat and Hexachordum Apollinis explored a range of keys for which the tuning was not always properly adjusted. This demonstrated the need for continued advancement of harmonic systems and set the stage for the next generation's exploration of equal temperament.