Title: Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo
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| Johann Pachelbel |
Composer: Johann Pachelbel
Pachelbel's Canon is the name commonly given to a canon by the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel in his Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo (German: Kanon und Gigue für 3 Violinen mit Generalbaß) (PWC 37, T. 337, PC 358). It is his most famous composition. It was originally scored for three violins and basso continuo and paired with a gigue. Both movements are in the key of D major. Like most other works by Pachelbel and other pre-1700 composers, the Canon remained forgotten for centuries and was rediscovered only in the 20th century. Several decades after it was first published in 1919 the piece became extremely popular.
In his lifetime, Pachelbel was renowned primarily for his organ and other keyboard music, whereas today he is also recognised as an important composer of church and chamber music. Little of his chamber music survives, however. Only Musikalische Ergötzung—a collection of partitas published during Pachelbel's lifetime—is known, apart from a few isolated pieces in manuscripts. The Canon and Gigue in D major is one such piece. A single 19th-century manuscript copy of them survives, Mus.MS 16481/8 in the Berlin State Library. It contains two more chamber suites. Another copy, previously in Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, is now lost. The circumstances of the piece's composition are wholly unknown. One writer hypothesised that the Canon may have been composed for Johann Christoph Bach's wedding, on 23 October 1694, which Pachelbel attended. Johann Ambrosius Bach, Pachelbel, and other friends and family provided music for the occasion. Johann Christoph Bach, the oldest brother of Johann Sebastian Bach, was a pupil of Pachelbel.
The Canon (without the accompanying gigue) was first published in 1919 by scholar Gustav Beckmann, who included the score in his article on Pachelbel's chamber music. His research was inspired and supported by renowned early music scholar and editor Max Seiffert, who in 1929 published his arrangement of the Canon and Gigue in his Organum series. However, that edition contained numerous articulation marks and dynamics not in the original score. Furthermore, Seiffert provided tempi he considered right for the piece, but that were not supported by later research. The Canon was first recorded in 1940 by Arthur Fiedler, and a popular recording of the piece was made in 1968 by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra.
Music
Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon, but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part.
In Germany, Italy, and France of the 17th century, some pieces built on ground bass were called chaconnes or passacaglias; such ground-bass works sometimes incorporate some form of variation in the upper voices. While some writers consider each of the 28 statements of the ground bass a separate variation, one scholar finds that Pachelbel's canon is constructed of just 12 variations, mostly four bars in length, and describes them as follows:
1 (bars 3–6) quarter notes
2 (bars 7–10) eighth notes
3 (bars 11–14) sixteenth notes
4 (bars 15–18) leaping quarter notes, rest
5 (bars 19–22) 32nd-note pattern on scalar melody
6 (bars 23–26) staccato, eighth notes and rests
7 (bars 27–30) sixteenth note extensions of melody with upper neighbour notes
8 (bars 31–38) repetitive sixteenth note patterns
9 (bars 39–42) dotted rhythms
10 (bars 43–46) dotted rhythms and 16th-note patterns on upper neighbour notes
11 (bars 47–50) syncopated quarter and eighth notes rhythm
12 (bars 51–56) eighth-note octave leaps
Pachelbel's Canon thus merges a strict polyphonic form (the canon) and a variation form (the chaconne, which itself is a mixture of ground bass composition and variations). Pachelbel skilfully constructs the variations to make them both pleasing and subtly undetectable.
Canon in D video:
Canon in D (Full Score) pdf file:
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