Mozart lived for just 35 years - years in which he knew great joy and great sorrow, and composed music that was to enrich the lives of millions yet unborn. An infant prodigy, he wrote his first minuet at the age of six, his first opera at eleven. He died on December 1791 with The Magic Flute completed just a few months earlier, the Requiem still unfinished; and his story has become a legend. Popular myth represented him as a simple-minded youth with a miraculous musical gift: the truth is far more complicated and exciting.