In 1802, for reasons which he explains in his Preface, Forkel published from Hoffmeister and Kühnel’s “Bureau de Musique” his _Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst,_ of which a new edition was issued by Peters in 1856. The original edition bears a dedication to Gottfried Baron van Swieten(1) (1734-1803), Prefect of the Royal Library, Vienna, and sometime Austrian Ambassador in Berlin, a friend of Haydn and Mozart, patron of Beethoven, a man whose age allowed him to have seen Bach, and whose career makes the association with Bach that Forkel’s dedication gives him not undeserved. It was he, an ardent Bach enthusiast, who introduced the youthful Mozart to the music of the Leipzig Cantor. “I go every Sunday at twelve o’clock to the Baron van Swieten,” Mozart writes in 1782, “where nothing is played but Handel and Bach, and I am now making a collection of the Fugues of Bach.” The merit and limitations of Forkel’s book will be considered later. For the moment the fact deserves emphasis that, inadequate as it is, it presented a fuller picture of Bach than so far had been drawn, and was the first to render the homage due to his genius. In an illuminating chapter (xii.), _Death and Resurrection_, Schweitzer has told the story of the neglect that obscured Bach’s memory after his death in 1750. Isolated voices, raised here and there, acclaimed his genius. With Bach’s treatise on _The Art of Fugue_ before him, Johann Mattheson (1681-1664), the foremost critic of the day, claimed that Germany was “the true home of Organ music and Fugue.” Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-95), the famous Berlin theorist, expressed the same opinion in his preface to the edition of that work published shortly after Bach’s death. But such appreciations were rare. Little of Bach’s music was in print and available for performance or critical judgment. Even at St. Thomas’s, Leipzig, it suffered almost complete neglect until a generation after Forkel’s death. The bulk of Bach’s MSS. was divided among his family, and Forkel himself, with unrivalled opportunity to acquaint himself with the dimensions of Bach’s industry, knew little of his music except the Organ and Clavier compositions. In these circumstances it is not strange that Bach’s memory waited for more than half a century for a biographer. Forkel, however, was not the first to assemble the known facts of Bach’s career or to assert his place in the music of Germany.