Johann Pachelbel mark Jose

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.

Stephen's 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 town's 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 couple's seven

children, two would later become organists, including his eldest son Wilhelm Hieronymus

who acted as Pachelbel's 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

teacher's 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 Pachelbel's 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 ChorÐ'le 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.

Pachelbel's 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