John Eliot Gardiner is one of the world's leading conductors, not only of Baroque music but across the whole repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. He has conducted most of the world's great orchestras and in many of the leading opera houses. He lives and farms in Dorset, England.

"From one of Bach's greatest living interpreters: a landmark study which explains in wonderful detail how the composer worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects--and what it can tell us about Bach the man. Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most famously unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque--and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and the fruits of this lifetime's immersion are now distilled in this remarkable book. It is grounded in all the most recent Bach scholarship but moves far beyond it as well, taking us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. This is an unparalleled book about one of the greatest of all creative artists"