Pachelbel's Canon

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Lore & Background

In his lifetime, Pachelbel was renowned for his organ and other keyboard music, whereas today he is also recognized as an important composer of church and chamber music. Little of his chamber music survives, however. Only Musikalische Ergötzung—a collection of partitas published during Pachelbel's lifetime—is known, apart from a few isolated pieces in manuscripts. The Canon and Gigue in D major is one such piece. A single 19th-century manuscript copy of them survives, Mus.ms. 16481/8 in the Berlin State Library. It contains two more chamber suites. Another copy, previously in Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, is now lost. The circumstances of the piece's composition are unknown. Hans-Joachim Schulze, writing in 1985, suggested that the piece may have been composed for Johann Christoph Bach's wedding, on 23 October 1694, which Pachelbel attended. Johann Ambrosius Bach, Pachelbel, and other friends and family provided music for the occasion. Johann Christoph Bach, the oldest brother of Johann Sebastian Bach, was a pupil of Pachelbel. Pachelbel scholar Kathryn Jane Welter considers this 'pure speculation'. Another scholar, Charles E. Brewer, investigated a variety of possible connections between Pachelbel's and Heinrich Biber's published chamber music. His research indicated that the Canon may have been composed in response to a chaconne with canonic elements which Biber published as part of Partia III of Harmonia artificioso-ariosa. That would indicate that Pachelbel's piece cannot be dated earlier than 1696, the year of publication of Biber's collection. Other dates of the Canon's composition are occasionally suggested, for example, as early as 1680.

Reader's Guide

Like his other works, Pachelbel's Canon went out of style, and remained in obscurity for centuries. A 1968 arrangement and recording of it by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra gained popularity over the next decade. This rendition was done in a more Romantic style, at a significantly slower tempo than it had been played at before, and contained obbligato parts, written by Paillard. The Paillard recording was released in June in France by Erato Records as part of an LP record that also included the Trumpet Concerto by Johann Friedrich Fasch and other works. In 1970, a classical radio station in San Francisco played the Paillard recording and became inundated by listener requests. The piece gained growing fame, particularly in California. In 1974, London Records reissued a 1961 album of the Corelli Christmas Concerto performed by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, which happened to contain the piece, now re-titled to Pachelbel Kanon: the Record That Made it Famous and other Baroque Favorites. The album was the highest-selling classical album of 1976. Its use from 1975 in television ads for Pure New Wool popularised the piece in Britain and Ireland. By the early 1980s its presence as background music was deemed inescapable. The composition is famously used in weddings and funeral ceremonies in the western world. The canon is in three voices spaced by a span of two measures; it unfolds over an ostinato in the bass which provides the harmonic basis for the piece, implying a progression of eight chords. The harmonic progression follows a sequential pattern known as the Romanesca. Pachelbel's canon merges a strict polyphonic form (the canon) and a variation form (the chaconne).

Did You Know?

• In 1968, Greek band Aphrodite's Child released the single 'Rain and Tears', a baroque-rock adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon that reached number 1 on pop charts in various European countries.
• The Paillard recording of the canon reached number 1 on the Billboard Classical Albums chart in January 1982 and stayed there until May 1982.
• The canon was selected for the soundtrack of Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and Sagan cited it as one of his Desert Island Discs on the BBC on 18 July 1981.
• Pianist George Winston's 'Variations on the Kanon by Johann Pachelbel' on his 1982 album December has sold over three million copies.