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 wife and infant son in 1683, inspiring Musicalische Sterbens-Gedancken. After fleeing French forces in the War of the Grand Alliance, he turned down Oxford and returned to Nuremberg in 1695 without an audition, publishing Hexachordum Apollinis and grand vocal Vespers before his death in 1706. The episode closes with the ground bass mechanics of the Canon and its 1968 resurrection by Jean-François Paillard.

• How the Habsburg court treated musical talent as a diplomatic passport across the Protestant-Catholic divide
• Why a rare virtuoso could be dismissed overnight as ornamental staff in a grieving aristocratic court
• How chorale variations became a sonic roadmap for processing grief after the Erfurt plague
• Why Pachelbel favored harmonic clarity and repercussion subjects over the technical flexing of northern German organists
• How his teaching reached Johann Sebastian Bach indirectly and how a 28-repetition bass loop became the godfather of pop