The same chord progression that signals a bride walking down the aisle also powers late-1990s pop-punk anthems, and both trace back to a 17th-century German organist too often dismissed as a classical one-hit wonder. This episode moves past the ubiquity of the Canon in D to tell the story of Johann Pachelbel himself, born in Nuremberg in 1653 to a wine dealer, admitted to the University of Altdorf at 15, forced to drop out for lack of money, and rescued by a scholarship to the Gymnasium Poeticum in Regensburg, where a mentor opened his ears to emotive Italian music.

We follow him to St. Stephen's Cathedral in Catholic Vienna as a lifelong Lutheran, to Eisenach where he befriended Johann Ambrosius Bach and was fired when the Duke's brother died, and to Erfurt, where a contract demanded a major new work every year and where plague killed his  ...