Bach has had scores of biographers, but seemingly very few who have tried to make him a very approachable personality, even to the millions who love his music the most. There was a time, not so very long ago, when Bach's music was avoided as highbrow and tuneless. Those days have gone for ever, but knowledge and understanding of the man himself have lagged behind appreciation of his music. For the first time, here is a life of Bach for the person who wants common sense, sympathy, a lively sense of personality—anything, in fact, except mystification or mysticism. This book is the fruit of profound and multifarious creations of that greatest of Saxon musicians by one who is himself no mean player of the violin. It is full of those  humorous and slightly crotchety divigations that make a Van Loon book an adventure in wry but fundamentally genial scepticism. In short, Dr Van Loon's Bach is the most precious, certainly the rarest, kind of biography; it shows (without sounding like a textbook) why Bach wrote the sort of music he did.

From the dust jacket