Johann Kuhnau has always been better known as a composer and predecessor to Johann Sebastian Bach as cantor at the Thomaskirche (Saint Thomas's Church) in Leipzig than as a literary figure. His compositions are still played, and a few have been recorded; but his novels had been out of print for two hundred years when, in 1900, Kurt Benndorf's edition of his Der musicalische Quack-Salber (The Musical Quack, 1700), one of the most cleverly written humorous novels in German literature, awakened short-lived interest in Kuhnau as a writer. The publication of facsimile editions of all three of his novels in 1992 revealed him to be not only a gifted imitator of the peculiarly German form of the politischer Roman (political novel)--a kind of early, crude bildungsroman-but also an ingenious, imaginative humorist with strong affinities to another celebrated seventeenth-century musician-novelist, Johann Beer.

Information about Kuhnau's early life comes largely from his...