Which composer wrote the opera The Magic Flute?

Mozart, in 1791, the year he died - and it was not written for a court but for a suburban Viennese theatre run by a friend, Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto and played Papageno himself. It is a popular entertainment with talking animals, a giant serpent and slapstick, and simultaneously a Masonic allegory about initiation and enlightenment, which is a genuinely strange combination that works.

The Queen of the Night's second aria is the most famous demand in opera - it reaches top F, near the ceiling of the human voice, in a passage of rapid staccato. Mozart wrote it for his sister-in-law, who could do it; relatively few singers since can, and it has become the standard by which a coloratura soprano is measured.

He was dead within ten weeks of the premiere, at 35, of something that has never been settled - rheumatic fever, kidney failure and a streptococcal infection are the leading candidates, and the poisoning story that Salieri encouraged in his own confused old age is fiction. He was buried in a common grave, which was not a pauper's disgrace but standard Viennese practice under Josephine burial reforms, and the exact spot is unknown.