Pachelbel––the name is pronounced with accent on the second

syllable––was a lifelong organist who settled for a time in

Thuringia, and broadened the already rich organ culture there

through his extensive South German training and experience.

One generation removed from Johann Sebastian Bach, he was

friends with Bach's father, godparent to one of Bach's

sisters, and primary teacher of Bach's older brother and

guardian, Johann Christoph Bach. His compositions consist

mainly of keyboard works, and the present volume (the first

in a projected ten-volume set) contains the thirteen

larger-scaled Toccatas (and one Praeludium) in which the

role of the organ pedals is obbligato. Four of these are

drawn from two famous sources for which Johann Christoph

Bach was the principal scribe--the so-called

Andreas-Bach-Buch, and the so-called Möllersche

Handscrift. Another four, however, have no extant primary

source, but derive from Franz Commer's 1839 edition in

Musica Sacra, Sammlung der besten Meisterwerke des 17. und

18. Jahrhunderts. (Commer's sources, once housed at the

Berlin Hochschule für Musik and darstellende Kunst, have

been lost since World War II.) In general, Pachelbel's preludes

and toccatas are intended to be paired with fugues in the

same key, though he appears not to have left behind any

fixed pairings, as did Bach. In the present volume, four of

the works are in G minor, another four in C major, two each

in F major and D minor, and one each in C minor and E minor.

Some of these may have been concert pieces, since Pachelbel

was officially required to give recitals at least once a

year every June 24th, for Saint John's Day. But those who

seek in these works the flash and flare of the North German

manner will be disappointed; Pachelbel eschews the wild

variety of the stylus phantasticus, and tends to

overwork his ideas to the point of tedium, as for example,

in the overextended sequences in nos. 1, 6, 8, and 10, the

unvaried rhythmic motion in nos. 5 and 11, and the

insufferably long pedal-points almost everywhere (it is hard

to accept the notion, but these pedal-points seem to have served

primarily to allow instrumentalists to tune their instruments). The

best of these works are probably no. 4, a "playful" C major,

no. 7, a "pathetic" C minor, and no. 9, an introduction and

pastorale.

© The American Organist