At junior high school in Pyongyang, he corrected and chastised his teachers for incorrectly interpreting history, according to his official biography. Moving on to higher education, he found time to write 1,500 books during his three years at Kim Il-sung University, from where he graduated in 1964, and penned six full operas in two years - "all of which are better than any in the history of music", his biography gushes.