Johann Pachelbel
mark Jose
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Johann Pachelbel
Mark Jose
(1653 – 1706) 02/06/06
Period 4
German composer and organist. He studied music with Heinrich Schwemmer and
G. C. Wecker, attended lectures at the Auditorium aegidianum and entered the university
at Altdorf in 1669, where he also served as organist at the Lorenzkirche. He was forced to
leave the university after less than a year owing to lack of funds, and became a scholarship
student at the Gymnasium poeticum at Regensburg, taking private instruction under
Kaspar Prentz. In 1673 Pachelbel went to Vienna and became deputy organist at St.
Stephens Cathedral; in 1677 he became organist in Thuringen at the Eisenach court,
where he served for slightly over a year. This was an important move, since it was here
that he became a dose friend of the towns most prominent musician,
Johann Ambrosius Bach, the future father of Johann Sebastian, and his family.
In 1678, Pachelbel obtained the first of the two important positions he was to hold
during his lifetime when he became organist at the Protestant Predigerkirche at Erfurt,
where he established his reputation as organist, composer, and teacher. Pachelbel
undertook the musical education of the young man who, not many years later, would
teach his brother Johann Sebastian all he knew when the latter came to live with his family
following the death of their parents.
Pachelbel started a family in Erfurt; after the early death of his first wife and their
child, he remarried and produced a highly artistic household: of the couples seven
children, two would later become organists, including his eldest son Wilhelm Hieronymus
who acted as Pachelbels successor at Nuremberg for thirty-nine years, another son who became an instrument maker and a daughter who achieved recognition as a painter and
engraver.
Pachelbel left Erfurt some years later, apparently looking for a better appointment,
musician and organist for the Wurttemberg court at Stuttgart (1690-92), and then in
Gotha (1692-95), where he was town organist. His travels finally led him home when he
was invited to succeed Wecker as organist of St. Sebald, Nuremberg, after his former
teachers death in 1695; he obtained his release from Gotha that same year and remained at
St. Sebald until his death. He died in the first months of 1706 at the young age of 52.
Johann Pachelbel was one of the dominant figures of late seventeenth-century European
keyboard music.
Many of Pachelbels students, in particular, had actively transmitted his inimitable
art of chorale variation, including Johann Christoph Bach who doubtless passed the
knowledge on to his younger brother. Pachelbel, like many of this foremost
contemporaries, was somehow able to combine his professional activities as a church
musician, secular musician and teacher, not to mention his responsibilities as the father of
a large family, with his activities as a composer. in keeping with the customs of the time,
he published only a small number of his compositions, since copper engraving was an
expensive process and published works had to have some special feature to make them
attractive to prospective purchasers. First, in Erfurt, he brought out a small collection of
four chorales with variations in 1683, which he entitled Musicaliscbe Sterbensgedancken
(Musical Thoughts on Death; next, in Nuremberg, six Sonatas for two violins and bass,
and the collection Musicalissche Eigцtzung (Musical Rejoicing, circa 1691), eight chorale
preludes, Acht ChorÐle zum Praeambulieren in 1693, and lastly, in 1699, his master work, Hexachordum Apollinis, the Hexachord of Apollo, containing six Arias with variations in
six different keys for harpsichord (or organ), including the famous Aria Sebaldina in F
minor, and which includes a dedication to Buxtehude and his Vienna contemporary
Ferdinand Tobias Richter.
Pachelbels secular output consisted of around twenty harpsichord suites, sets of
variations and various instrumental works. As a parish musician, though, the bulk of this
work was written for church services, in particular Mass and Vespers, in which both
singers and instrumentalists took part. Around twenty-six motets, nineteen spiritual songs,
thirteen Magnificats, spiritual concerts and masses have survived. Like both
SchÑŒtz and Buxtehude, Pachelbel liked to experiment with