Canon In D: A Song History

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The piece everyone calls Pachelbel's Canon is really the first half of a pair: a Canon and Gigue in D major for three violins and basso continuo[1][2]. Its composer, Johann Pachelbel, was baptized in Nuremberg in 1653 and died there in 1706[3]. Over a short bass line repeated again and again, the three violins play the same melody, each entering a little after the one before and growing more elaborate as it goes[1]. Nobody knows exactly when Pachelbel wrote it, and sources differ: Britannica gives about 1680–90[1], while an article on the classical-music site Interlude labels it c. 1700[4].

Violin made by Nicolò Amati in Cremona in 1669

Nicolò Amati, Violin, Cremona, spruce and maple, 1669. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A violin made in Pachelbel’s lifetime; shown for the instrument only.

The work survives only by a thin thread. According to the critical notes in G. Henle's modern edition, an older manuscript once held at a church-music institute in Berlin-Charlottenburg is presumed lost, so the earliest surviving source is a score copied by an unknown hand in the early nineteenth century and kept at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin[2]; the music catalogue RISM dates that copy to around 1840[5]. The canon was first printed in 1919, in an article by Gustav Beckmann on Pachelbel's chamber music in the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft[2][6]. The gigue did not appear until Max Seiffert's 1929 edition, which piled on performance markings absent from the lost manuscript and which the Henle editor judges "very unreliable"[2].

For most of the twentieth century the Canon was little known[1]. That changed after the Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra recorded a slow, lush version in 1968, issued by the mail-order Musical Heritage Society[6][4]; Paillard's version went on to become a worldwide hit and a fixture of public-radio and television pledge drives[7]. Its use in the 1980 film Ordinary People spread it further[1][6], and it became a wedding standard, especially in the United States[1]. Pop musicians borrowed it almost at once: Aphrodite's Child released "Rain and Tears" in 1968[4], and its chord pattern still turns up in new songs such as Maroon 5's "Memories"[8].

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Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (Betsy Schwarm): "Pachelbel's Canon".
  2. G. Henle Verlag (Norbert Müllemann, 2011): "Comments" (critical notes to the Henle edition of Pachelbel's Canon and Gigue).
  3. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Johann Pachelbel".
  4. Interlude: "How Did Pachelbel's Canon Become So Popular?".
  5. RISM: "Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)".
  6. Robert Fink (UCLA), via Academia.edu: "Prisoners of Pachelbel: An Essay in Post-Canonic Musicology".
  7. ArtsJournal (Matthew Westphal): "Conductor Jean-François Paillard Dead At 85".
  8. CBC Music: "Maroon 5's new song, 'Memories,' is basically Pachelbel's Canon".