In this eye-opening study of German prose fiction written between 1660 and 1710, Stephen Rose has unveiled for us a richly detailed, complicated and above all unfamiliar portrait of the musician around the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. The texts he explicates include novels, stories and treatises by a cluster of musician-writers, chiefly Johann Beer, Johann Kuhnau, Wolfgang Caspar Printz and Daniel Speer, with a backward glance at the father of them all, Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen, and a forward one to the disciplining, classifying work of Johann Mattheson in the first half of the eighteenth century. These texts, and there are many of them, do not easily reveal their deeper meanings or broader significance. Earlier generations of scholars of German baroque literature devoted most of their effort to the difficult work of establishing authorship and dates, and preparing more or less accurate editions of them all. Rose builds well upon this solid foundation, and, without any disrespect to his predecessors, one can say that he has made this body of work comprehensible and attractive to a twenty-first-century audience. His skill in decoding and contextualizing them is consistently impressive. The thread he traces through all of them – the key, as it were, to his decoding of them – is anxiety, and particularly anxiety about the status of the musician in society.

To be sure, one can overplay the anxiety card, especially since its presence in people of the past can rarely be definitely proven or disproven. That said, early modern musicians had much to be anxious about. Job insecurity characterized every setting in which they worked. Regimes changed, or princes changed their minds and fired the musicians or hired others, especially foreign others. Town-guild structures did not make room for musicians or, if they did, the musicians' guilds proved ineffective in keeping out all manner of intruders and riff-raff, beer fiddlers, hurdy-gurdy players, underemployed court musicians and foreigners (again). The town fathers who employed musicians often had little musical training and only limited interest in maintaining a good musical establishment. If the characteristic attitude of the prince was to wish for the prestige of courtly cosmopolitanism and thus hire Italian musicians, then the characteristic attitude of the town father was to be suspicious of musicians as unsound types, dangerously attuned to the unruly and unmanageable currents of human physicality. Rose does an excellent job of illuminating all this.

He does so partly by mining the secondary literature on the social position of musicians in early modern society and on general attitudes toward the musical arts. But mostly he deduces, and indeed posits, the existence of such job insecurities from the amount of attention paid to issues of status, sensual pleasure and town–court tensions in the literature he studies. There is, to put it otherwise, a bit of the psychologist in Rose, someone who follows the evolutionary psychologists in regarding anxiety as something generated by the human organism to increase vigilance and spur defensive or aggressive action against the source of anxiety. Musicians' anxiety manifested itself in a variety of efforts to raise these issues of the status, place and purpose of music in forms that the key actors in shaping a musician's life – officialdom in all its guises and, to a lesser extent, consumers in a musical marketplace – might read and allow to influence them. In Rose's meticulous and imaginative readings of this body of writing, the form and content of musicians' writings worked together, through a variety of rhetorical and narrative devices, to make a case for the value of music in society.

Rose does not, then, use these writings to show so much what musicians did at this time as what musicians – particularly literate, educated and ambitious ones – worried about. Picaresque novels (following Grimmelshausen) depicted musicians subject to the power of fate, wanderers thrust by fortune to the edges of society and drifting from one adventure to another, many of them salacious. Political novels (following Christian Weise) presented portraits of musicians as honourable craftsmen, often suffering from ‘status inconsistency’ (that is, the gap between their position and their actual worthiness) and always defending their trade against fools, tyrants, ignoramuses and scoundrels. Satirical and scholarly treatises explored philosophical issues about the role of music not just in society but in the universe, implicitly asserting its rightness in the greater scheme of things. Autobiographies and other ‘ego documents’ provided early intimations of the romantic cult of genius in their attention to how the person's inborn talent expressed a kind of beneficent divine providence. All these writings worked through the problems musicians faced, not always providing solutions but putting them out into the open so that people could read and think about them. As Rose interprets them, these works were not escapist; they ‘represent the world’, in the manner of a ‘distorted mirror’, while ‘also seeking to transform it’ (42).

The existence of these written works by musicians, regardless of their aesthetic value or social and political effectiveness, is a remarkable phenomenon. Rose does a magnificent job of revealing just how extensive and varied were the uses of literacy on the part of people whose main expertise and source of income was their musical, not literary, training. Moreover, in one of his most effective pieces of archival detective work, he constructs a plausible account of their readership, suggesting how extensive it was throughout the eighteenth century, fading thereafter. It would be very interesting to follow the fate of these works after the rise of romanticism; they seem to have effectively disappeared in the century or so following 1750 often referred to as the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period), their depictions and defences of the musical life no longer relevant, their style antiquated and unappealing. Nevertheless, in ways that Rose suggests but does not highlight, this literature speaks to something that did concern later generations of musicians, and that was the question of German national consciousness. In a chapter on how this literature addresses the problem of social mobility for those of ‘modest birth’, he writes that ‘German musicians were particularly prone to feelings of status inconsistency’ (114). In the paragraphs that follow, it is not clear whether the emphasis in that sentence should be on ‘German’ or ‘musicians’. Certainly there is much evidence of concern about the high prestige of Italians in German musical life in the writings of Beer, Printz and Kuhnau; Kuhnau's ‘musical charlatan’ has a fake Italian name (Caraffa) and the basis of his musical confidence game is his claim to having studied music in Italy. The presence of an embryonic discourse about music and Germanness is just one of the many fascinating aspects of this literary output.

Despite his attention to a number of writers and despite the book title's reference to the ‘age of Bach’, the figure who dominates this book – through the virtuosic inventiveness, verve and strangeness of his work – is Johann Beer (1655–1700), a musician-writer who is currently the subject of a modest renaissance among literary scholars and musicologists in Germany. Everyone else looks pallid, dull, pedantic or unoriginal by comparison. Beer was not, of course, a figure of the eighteenth century, and later developments do seem to leave him behind. Rose suggests that the first decades of the eighteenth century saw an inexorable move away from his action-packed, magical-realist, absurdist style of writing about the world to one that was more tuned to Enlightenment projects of self-knowledge, secular knowledge, and taxonomic, classificatory and controlling knowledge. Nevertheless, one's sympathies remain secretly – rather like so many of Beer's clandestine readers – with the baroque, shambolic energy of the man. In a book without a weak chapter, the most intriguing was chapter 5, ‘From Harmony to Discord’, which provides a rich account of Beer's mastery of the extraordinarily inventive early modern discourse of emblems, proverbs and the play of resemblances in the world. The portrait of Beer that emerges from Rose's book is reason enough to read the book and praise it. But all scholars of Europe and its musical traditions, especially of course of the German ones, will find riches aplenty in this erudite, elegant and fascinating book.