Pavan The Earl of Salisbury - William Byrd performed by Jonathan Delbridge on a Broadwood 1814 piano

[@Renshen1957]

The Earl of Salisbury Pavan William Byrd for which an actual date can be suggested. Robert Cecil was made Earl in 1605, and died on May 24, 1612, just months before the compilation of Parthenia. Timothy Dickey wrote on the historical coincidence, and the solemn character of the Pavan, which suggesta a memorial composition for Cecil. "The Pavan for the Earl of Salisbury contains many musical singularities: it is the only such piece Byrd wrote with only two strains (instead of the usual three), it is the only one for which Byrd did not write ornamentations for the repeats, and it is the only late Pavan in the more clipped eight-bar phrases." The US music publisher G. Schirmer in 1904 published Early Keyboard Music, edited by Louis Oesterle (which included 2 sonatas of D. Scarlatti edited by Hans von Bülow). Volume 1 Contained The Earl of Salisbury Pavan. Circa 1972, Denis Agay, included the work in his Baroque Period Volume of his Classical Music Piano Anthology. The same volume contained a d minor Fantasia of Johann Pachelbel, in an episode in the relative major is the first half of the Fugue Subject for J S Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor, BWV 565. At this time I was sight reading pieces, I nearly fell of the Piano bench when I played this. J. Pachelbel was J S Bach's older brother's organ teacher, Godfather to Bach's older sister, and at the older brother's wedding among the invited guests, and good friend of J S Bach's father, high probablility that Bach met the master then. Pachelbel left for another city, purchased a home from the widow of J. A. Bach's cousin. J. Pachelbel first wife and children died of the bubonic plague. He subsequently remarried. Of his two musician sons, the younger, Theodore Pachelbel (he was 5 years younger than J S Bach, and had undoubtedly met) emmigrated to the English colonies in the Americas in 1733 first to Boston, then called Newport, Rhode Island to install an organ (and be organist for two years), then to New York, and finally Charleston (South Carolina) to be organist, and have one of the first clavichords in North America.

[@JonathanDelbridgeMusic]

Thanks. This is all such useful information. I must admit I don't play as much Byrd keyboard music as I should, but I do love this piece. Its often the case that some of the simpler, shorter pieces are just full of beauty!