He wrote hundreds of organ chorales that nobody remembers. The Canon is the odd one out in his own catalogue.
Pachelbel was born in Nuremberg in 1653 and spent his whole working life as a church organist — Vienna, Eisenach, Erfurt, Stuttgart, Gotha, one post after another, and finally back home to St Sebaldus in Nuremberg, where he stayed until he died.
During his Erfurt years he taught a student named Johann Christoph Bach. That was Bach's elder brother — the one who raised Bach after their parents died, and taught him the keyboard. So there is a line running from Pachelbel into Bach's hands.
Plague reached Erfurt in 1683 and took his wife and his son in the same outbreak. Afterwards he wrote a set of chorale variations and gave it a title of his own: Musical Thoughts on Death.
Almost everything he left behind is organ and church music; the Canon and Gigue in D is a rare chamber piece and not typical of him at all. It then sank for more than two centuries and was only brought back in the twentieth century — and it is the reason most people can name him today.
Pachelbel usually works like this: he gives you a short thing as a foundation, then builds on top of it, layer by layer. The foundation barely moves; what changes is above it.
He does not write dramatic turns and rarely gets suddenly loud. Listening to him is more like watching something grow — each round has a little more than the last, and by the time you notice, it is already full.
