Johann Pachelbel(1653 - 1706)German composer and organist. He studied music with Heinrich Schwemmer and GC Wecker attended lectures at the Auditorium aegidianum and entered the university of Altdorf in 1669, where he also served as organist at the Lorenzkirche. He was forced to leave university after less than a year due to lack of funds, and became a scholarship student at the Gymnasium poeticum in Regensburg, taking private lessons with Kaspar Prentz. In 1673 Pachelbel went to Vienna and became vice-organist of St. Stephen's Cathedral; in 1677 he became organist in Thuringen at the court of Eisenach, where he served for just over a year. This was an important move, as it was here that he became a close friend of the city's most important musician, Johann Ambrosius Bach, Johann Sebastian's future father, and his family. In 1678, Pachelbel obtained the first of two important positions he was to hold during his lifetime when he became organist at the Protestant Predigerkirche in Erfurt, where he established his reputation as an organist, composer and teacher. Pachelbel took charge of the musical education of the young man who, not many years later, would teach everything he knew to his brother Johann Sebastian when the latter came to live with his family after the death of their parents. Pachelbel founded a family in Erfurt; after the premature deaths of his first wife and son, he remarried and formed a highly artistic family: of the couple's seven children, two would later become organists, including their eldest son Wilhelm Hieronymus who was Pachelbel's successor in Nuremberg for thirty-nine years, a another son who became an instrument maker and a daughter who achieved recognition as a painter and engraver. Pachelbel left Erfurt a few years later, apparently in search of a better position, musician and organist for the Wurttemberg Court in Stuttgart (1690-92), then in Gotha (1692-95), where he was city organist. His travels finally brought him home when he