By Darren Waters BBC News Online entertainment staff

BBC News Online profiles British composer Thomas Ad�s, whose opera The Tempest received its world premi�re at the Royal Opera House, London.

There was an enormous level of expectation surrounding the performance of The Tempest at Covent Garden - and not just because it was a rare world premi�re of a new work at the opera house.

Ad�s was hailed as a musical prodigy

Critics and audiences alike were eager to discover if the enormous hype and potential of the composer Thomas Ad�s is to be fully realised.

The 32-year-old is a composer of the highest standard - of that there is no disagreement among the critics.

"Tom must know that with all the attention he has had, this is make or break," composer Robin Holloway, a former teacher of Ad�s, told the Financial Times.

To give an idea of the expectation it is worth recapping the fulsome praise lavished on the man in recent years.

He has been described as "the youngest living composer of world repute", "potentially the first composer of the third millennium" and "the Great Bear in the British musical constellation".

And all that in just one article.

Over-praising

Over-praising British composers is common among critics - in the early 1990s the world's music press queued up to laud Ad�s as "the new Mozart" - and many young composers have failed to meet expected promise.

Born in Highgate, north London in 1971 to an intellectual, middle-class family, he studied music at the Guildhall School and King's College, Cambridge.

The Royal Opera is the venue for The Tempest

He first made an impact as a pianist, coming second in the piano class of the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition in 1989.

He started composing "seriously" - producing his first chamber symphony aged 18 - and pieces such as Five Eliot Landscapes, Living Toys and These Premises Are Alarmed were praised for their originality.

But it was his controversial chamber opera Powder Her Face, written aged 24, and the tone poem Asyla, commissioned for the Birmingham Symphony and given its premi�re under Sir Simon Rattle, which brought him to a wider audience.

Exhausting quavers

Asyla was even shortlisted for the Mercury Music prize.

The compliments duly followed, like 1,000 exhausting quavers on a score.

He was described as the most prodigious musical talent to appear in the UK since Benjamin Britten.

But since 1999 his output has been less explosively received as his role as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival began and as he started work on the Royal Opera House commission, which has been written in a relatively hurried two years.

His career rise had been meteoric, but some critics felt his work was a touch "flashy" - one critic described one of his pieces as "shallow sophistication".

He has also had a strained relationship with the media and has done few interviews since he was "misrepresented" in an article.

By then he had been labelled by some as a little too eager to "sound off" about his own talents and the lack of talents in others.

Even before its premiere, The Tempest was expected to be both original and controversial.