It plays at weddings, funerals, and rock concerts, and your brain recognizes those eight chords before the melody even begins. Yet Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D was lost for centuries and survived only because a single manuscript copy, transcribed sometime between 1838 and 1842, sat unplayed in the Berlin State Library until scholar Gustav Beckmann published it in 1919. This episode tells the biography of a single piece of music, from its mysterious late-1600s origins to its accidental transformation into the most famous crossover work in classical history.

We weigh the three competing theories about why the Canon was written, including the 1694 wedding of Johann Christoph Bach, unpack the ground bass and three-violin canon that create an illusion of acceleration without any tempo change, and follow the 1968 Jean-François Paillard recording ...