Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)
Organ Works Vol. 1

Johann Pachelbel is widely known for his Canon and Gigue for three violins and basso continuo, a composition that has now undergone arrangement after arrangement. Organists, at least, remain familiar with the quantity of music he wrote for the instrument on which he was a distinguished performer. Born in 1653 in Nuremberg, he is the leading representative of the South German school of organ music in the generation before that of Johann Sebastian Bach, a prolific composer of a body of work that is of significance in itself, apart from any influence it may have had on later musicians.

Pachelbel benefited from a sound general education and when the inability of his father to support him compelled his withdrawal after one year from study at the university in Altdorf, he was able to continue with a scholarship at the Regensburg Gymnasium Poeticum, taking extracurricular organ lessons from