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I have a confession to make: while I have long regarded Mozart as sublime, I was not really that familiar with him, only owning a bog-standard "greatest hits" collection and La Finta Simplice. After reading this book, suddenly I want to hear nothing else and have begun to acquire the greatest works identified within.

I am already an admirer of Pater Gay based on his monumental 2-volume work on the Enlightenment, and I must say, the light touch revealed in this small book is, well, a revelation. Gay is not merely the biographer of Mozart, but also the Mozart of biographers. Sometimes I wish that such short books were longer, but for Mozart this was just right. Mozart is in the music, after all.

Gay does not explain this enigmatic genius, but he does make him accessible and give an impression of the depth of his genius - for as a sometime bedroom rock guitarist and still listener I have no doubt that much of that genius evades my ear as it stands. Scatological of wit and irresponsible of money, Mozart was still a genius of unique standing and reputation, being known as a child prodigy at an age when most of us in today's world would have only the vaguest portents of our adult career. Moreover, he never stopped developing, neither as a prodigious child nor as a grown man. Who knows what could have come of him had he had the opportunity to die in his dotage. Alas, it was not to be. A mere decade after finally shaking free of the bondage of his controlling father, he was in his grave.

That bondage followed him even after his father's death, but musically Mozart was always his own man. That grave, recorded in popular memory as a pauper's, might not have seemed so unfitting to Mozart as to us. With the French revolution still drying to black crust on the baskets of Paris's squares, the nobility were not in the mood for ostentation and the Emperor had quashed lavish funerals. Mozart went into a grave typical of his time, his music to fall into contention and bowdlerisation for a little time to come. Mozart, a Catholic but not an especially pious figure, scathing of Voltaire but a freemason of the Age of Reason, would probably have found it fitting. Mozart took lovers and a wife, with an appealing affection for women, travelled, learned languages and was not averse to a party. Truly, this would not have been a wasted life even were it not for his exquisite legacy.

Gay's work is wonderfully light reading, devoured in a rush. I have heard the Beatles referred to as the Mozart of pop. Now biography has its own exemplar.

And no, Salieri didn't poison him.