Alma Deutscher
Alma Elizabeth Deutscher (born 19 February 2005) is a British composer, pianist and violinist. Deutscher composed her first piano sonata at the age of five. At seven, she completed a short opera "The Sweeper of Dreams". Aged nine, she wrote a violin concerto. At the age of ten, she wrote her first full-length opera, "Cinderella", which had its European premiere in Vienna in 2016 under the patronage of conductor Zubin Mehta, and its U.S. premiere a year later. Deutscher’s piano concerto was premiered when she was 12. She has lived in Vienna since 2018. She made  her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2019 in a concert dedicated to her own composition. Background and Education. Alma Elizabeth Deutscher was born on 19 February 2005, in Basingstoke, England. She is the daughter of literary scholar, Janie Deutscher (née Steen) and linguist, Guy Deutscher. Deutscher also has a younger sister, Helen Clara. She began playing piano at the age of two, followed by violin at three. Her strong affinity to music was apparent from an early age. She could sing in perfect pitch before she could speak, and she could read music before she could read words. In a  2017 interview with the "Financial Times", Deutscher said: "I remember when I was three and I was listening to a lullaby by Richard Strauss, I loved it! I especially loved the harmony; I always call it the Strauss harmony now. And after it finished I asked my parents "How could music be so beautiful?" She received a little violin as a present on her third birthday, and while her parents thought it would just be another toy, she was "so excited by it and tried playing on it for days on end", so her parents decided to find her a  teacher. Within a year she was playing Handel sonatas. At four she was improvising on the piano, and by five, had begun writing down her own compositions. These first written notations were unclear, but by age six, she could write clear compositions and had composed her first piano sonata, a recording of which was released in 2013. At seven, she composed her first short opera, "The Sweeper of Dreams," at nine, a violin concerto, and her first full-length opera at age ten. Until the age of 16, Deutscher was educated at home. She was registered for a school in  England when she was five, but after attending the first orientation day, she came back in tears, and told her parents: "they haven't taught me to read and write". Her parents then decided to educate her at home. They later explained on the BBC Documentary Imagine and on CBS 60 Minutes that they were led to choose home education by their realization that their daughter's "volcanic imagination" and creativity were essential to her well-being, and they came to the conclusion that the freedom required for this intense creativity and imagination cannot be provided in a school . Deutscher herself told the BBC when she was ten: "I never want to go to school. I have to go outside and get fresh air, and read." Two years later she explained to the Financial Times: "I think that I learn at home in one hour what it would take at school five hours to learn". In his 2017 BBC Documentary about Alma Deutscher, Alan Yentob described this intense world of imagination, in which Deutscher had created an imaginary country called "Transylvanian", with its own language and above all its own music"." "I made up my own land with its  own language and there are beautiful composers there, named Antonin Yellowsink and Ashy and Shell and Flara". These imaginary composers each had a different musical style, and Deutscher assigned various of her early compositions to these composers. Deutscher's early musical education focused on creative improvisation, following a method of teaching called Partimenti, which was developed in eighteenth-century Italy, and which has been revived and popularized by Professor Robert Gjerdingen. Gjerdingen sent exercises for Alma Deutscher and commented on technical aspects of her composition, while she had lessons in improvisation with the Swiss musician Tobias Cramm. Deutscher thus initially  became fluent in the musical grammar of eighteenth-century music, which she later described as her musical "mother tongue". Deutscher came to popular media attention in 2012, when she was seven, after writer and comedian Stephen Fry commented on her YouTube channel: "Simply mind-blowing: Alma Deutscher playing her own compositions. A new Mozart?" In 2014, Deutscher's half-hour musical performance and interview on "Intermezzo with Arik", a television program hosted by pianist and pedagogue Arie Vardi, brought her to the attention of leading figures in the classical music world, including conductor Zubin Mehta. In the same year, a  viral YouTube mashup video released by musician Kutiman featured an ostinato from one of Deutscher's early videos. In 2018, Deutscher moved with her family to Vienna, which she has described as her "musical homeland". She explained to "The New York Times" in 2019: "I lived in England, but I grew up on the music of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Haydn. Musically speaking, I think that Vienna's always been my home." In 2021, she was admitted to the conducting degree at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, to study with conductor Johannes Wildner. At 16, she may  be the youngest student ever to be admitted to this conducting course, whose alumni include Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado and Kirill Petrenko. In the first years of her life, Deutscher was the subject of her father's linguistic experiments related to his professional research. In an effort to understand why ancient cultures did not use the term "blue" to describe the colour of the sky, he made sure never to inform his daughter that the sky was "blue". The development of her colour perceptions, and especially her insistence in an early age that the clear sky was "white", were reported  in Guy Deutscher's 2010 book, "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages". Deutscher is trilingual in English, German and Hebrew. Compositional Method, Style and Aesthetics. Deutscher's music has been noted above all for the wealth and beauty of its melodies. The Austrian Newspaper Wiener Zeitung termed Deutscher a 'Melodist by High Grace', whose cantilenas "convey bottomless grief or overflowing yearning". Deutscher herself explained that her melodies often arrive unbidden, including in her dreams. The opening of her first short opera, "The Sweeper of Dreams", came to her fully formed in a dream, as  well as the theme of a set of piano variations in E-flat major, which eventually became the basis of the third movement of her piano concerto. Deutscher has also described a special excited state-of-mind, which she called an "improvising mood". She told the Daily Telegraph in 2016, "When I am in an improvising mood, melodies burst from my fingertips." At a younger age she also described melodic inspiration arising from skipping with her 'magical' skipping rope: "I wave it around, and melodies pour into my head". In 2019 she told the New York Times: "When I was  younger, I really thought it was the rope that gave me inspiration. Now, I know it’s not really the rope, it’s the state of mind that I get into when I wave it around". However, Deutscher has explained in numerous interviews the fundamental difference between the spontaneous moments of inspiration, in which she hears melodies in her head, and the laborious process of composing complete polished pieces based on these melodies. To the "Financial Times", she said that the challenging part of composition is to develop the ideas and turn them into "a coherent structure. That’s extremely  difficult". Deutscher has repeatedly stated her determination to write beautiful music and bring back harmony to modern classical music. In a press conference of the Carinthischer Sommer Music Festival in 2017, which featured Deutscher's violin and piano concertos, she made a public statement about her style, her love of melody, and her musical aesthetics: "Why music should be beautiful". She explained that many people have told her that beautiful melodies are not acceptable in classical music of the twenty-first century, because music must reflect the complexity and ugliness of the modern world. "But I think that these people  just got a little bit confused. If the world is so ugly, then what's the point of making it even uglier with ugly music?". She then cited the lullaby by Richard Strauss as her earliest inspiration for creating beauty. In another interview, she explained: "Melody is the essence of [all] music – this is not just my own musical aesthetics, it’s the aesthetics of almost everyone, young and old. It’s not a great secret that the most loved pieces of music are the ones with the best tunes." In 2019, Deutscher told "The New York Times": "Lots of  people have been telling me that if I want to grow up, I have to compose music that will reflect the ugliness of the modern world. I don’t want to do this. I want to compose music that I find beautiful." To Cherwell magazine, she explained: "It’s the easiest thing in the world to create ugly music. You don’t need inspiration, you don’t need talent, you don’t need hard work", but as there is so much ugliness around, "why should I torture myself and my audience with more of it?" In a speech at the  Vienna State Opera in October 2019, on the occasion of receiving the European Culture Prize (and on the eve of Britain's rancorous withdrawal from the European Union), Deutscher said: "Until now, I have always composed melodies and harmonies just as they pour out from my heart. But I have often been told that as a modern composer, I’ll soon have to forget my melodies, and concentrate on dissonance, as befits our modern age. But maybe this award today means that a more tolerant age is dawning, when melody and beauty will once again be permitted. Perhaps this is  a message that there is more to European Culture than just dissonance. Perhaps there is also a place in European Culture for harmony." Critical reception. Much of the response to Deutscher in the first years of her public exposure centred on her young age and status as a child prodigy, with various prominent musicians such as the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and conductors Zubin Mehta and Sir Simon Rattle expressing amazement at what she had achieved at such a young age. Rattle told the BBC: "I don't know that I've come across anyone of that age with quite  such an astonishing range of gifts." Deutscher herself, however, always professed her dislike to her perception as a 'prodigy' and to her young age being the focus of the discussion. She said at the Google Zeitgeist conference when she was 10: "I want my music to be taken seriously ... and sometimes it's a little bit difficult for people to take me seriously because I'm just a little girl." Deutscher also repeatedly objected to the frequent headlines comparing her to Mozart: "I don't really want to be a little Mozart. I want to be Alma." After the celebrated  premiere of Deutscher's opera "Cinderella" in Vienna in 2016, the focus in the public reception of Deutscher's music has shifted to her unabashed love of melody and to her musical language and aesthetics. The striking quality of Deutscher's melodies was noticed early on. The musicologist Ron Weidberg wrote in 2015 that "few composers can write such tunes, which from the first moment are immediately impressed upon our memory, and thus turn into the possession of all those who listen to them. Alma is one of these composers." Deutscher's melodies were a major theme in the reception  of her opera "Cinderella" since 2016. The opera was described by one Viennese critic as containing "fireworks of earworms". The Spanish newspaper ABC wrote that "Cinderella is a flood of wonderful and radiant melodies, almost in excess." The German Opera Magazine Orpheus wrote that "Cinderella" was heralding the "Renaissance of German Singspiel". The Austrian Newspaper Der Standard expressed the hope that Deutscher's melodious music might help opera reconnect with the wider public and inject a new life into the world of opera, which has so often been pronounced dead. Deutscher's musical idiom draws on the harmonic framework of  18th and 19th century classical music. Renowned Austrian critic expressed his astonishment, when reviewing a performance of Deutscher's piano concerto in Vienna, that despite "moving in the Romantic worlds of Mendelssohn and Grieg, Deutscher's music is full of extraordinarily original ideas and genuine surprises." He concluded that it is a misconception that composers must reinvent musical language anew in each generation. "The world turns in a circle", he wrote, "but always sprouts new, beautiful flowers, if one only lets them sprout." On the other hand, critics who are invested in the ideology of musical modernism have criticized Deutscher 's refusal to embrace the harsh dissonances that characterize much of classical music since the second half of the twentieth century. For example, after a performance of Deutscher's Piano Concerto in Lucerne in 2018, a reviewer for the newspaper Luzerner Zeitung criticized the concerto's "pastel-melodious" idiom and asserted that "the duty of the young generation of artists should be to give to the audience not what it wants, but what it needs". The Wall Street Journal later observed that Deutscher's music is perceived as provocative by those who are committed to musical modernism. They "dislike her  music for the same reason audiences love it. They object to its traditional tonality, its straightforward emotional appeal". Operas. Section::::"The Sweeper of Dreams" (2012). Deutscher's first completed opera, from age seven, is a short work inspired by Neil Gaiman's story, "The Sweeper of Dreams", with the text adapted from a libretto by Elizabeth Adlington. Parts of the score came to Deutscher in a dream. The first performance of the opera was in Israel in 2013. In the story, a job is advertised for a Sweeper of Dreams, who is to help people forget their nightmares. The three middle -aged men on the committee are shocked to discover that the only candidate, Alex, is a sixteen-year-old girl. Her interviewers mock her, because she "committed two terrible crimes: the first was being a child, the second was being female." The theme of female empowerment is recurrent in Deutscher's operas, and also dominates her full length opera, "Cinderella". She told "The New York Times" in 2019: "I'm a very strong feminist and I'm really happy that I was born now, when girls are allowed to develop their talents.". She said she is particularly attracted to stories  of women overcoming adversity. Section::::"Cinderella" (2015–19). Deutscher's second opera is a full-length work based on the fairy tale of Cinderella, but with significant modifications of the plot, which in her version revolves around music. It is set in Deutscher's imaginary land, Transylvanian, in an opera house run by the Cinderella's stepmother. The two step-sisters are talentless would-be divas. Cinderella is a talented composer, with "beautiful melodies springing into her head", but she is not allowed to perform and is slaved-worked as a copyist. Prince Theodore is a poet, who is mocked at court  for his artistic leanings. In the first act, Cinderella chances upon a captivating love poem, which unbeknownst to her, was written by the Prince. She is inspired by the poem and sets it to music. Her beautiful melody is stolen by her step-sisters and performed at the singing competition during the royal ball, but with the wrong words. Finally, Cinderella herself sings her song to the prince with the right words, but unaware that he is the poet who wrote them. After Cinderella flees from the ball at midnight, the prince searches for her on the basis of a  melody (rather than a glass slipper) - the haunting melody she sang as she fled. Eventually, the pair are united: "they find each other like lyrics find melody". Deutscher explained that it was important for her that Cinderella "is not just a pretty girl who cleans the floor and keeps quiet, she’s clever and talented", and she wins the prince because of her talent as a composer. A chamber version of the opera was premiered in Israel in 2015, when Deutscher was 10. She finished writing the overture "just a few days before the performance". In the following year, Deutscher  expanded the opera and orchestrated it for an ensemble of 20 musicians, and this expanded version premiered in Vienna in 2016 (in German), with conductor Zubin Mehta as patron of the production. Deutscher performed the solo violin part in the opera as well as the solo piano. The opera was received with jubilation by the public, and reports about it appeared in newspapers all over the world, even on the front page of the China Daily newspaper. Numerous Viennese critics expressed their astonishment at the accomplishment of Deutscher's orchestral writing, and above all at the beauty of her melodies  (see critical reception). A further elaborated version of the opera received its U.S. premiered in December 2017, in a production of Opera San Jose and the Packard Humanities Institute, conducted by Dame Jane Glover. As in Vienna, Deutscher performed the violin and piano solo parts herself, and she also performed an Organ voluntary at the beginning of the royal wedding scene. The five original performances sold out and further performances were added. The New Criterion called it an "opera of astounding wit, craft, and musical beauty... The sheer amount of orchestral and vocal invention is stunning", and predicted that Cinderella  would find its way to Broadway. The magazine "Opera Today" described it as "a young talent’s sensational burst to prominence... a once-in-a-lifetime opera-going event that had audiences standing and cheering." The San Jose production was released on DVD by Sony Classical Records in 2018. In 2018, the Vienna State Opera staged an adaptation for children, which ran for two sold-out seasons, and was released on DVD on the State Opera's own label. In 2019 Deutscher further revised the opera for a new production at the Salzburg State Theatre which premiered in the season  2019/20 and was revived in 2020/21. A new production has been announced by Wexford Festival Opera (Ireland) for October 2022. A revival of the 2017 Opera San Jose production has been announced for November 2022, with Deutscher on the podium as musical director. The Emperor's New Waltz. Deutscher's second full-length opera, "The Emperor's New Waltz" (German: Des Kaisers neue Walzer), is a commission of the Salzburg State Theatre. The premiere has been announced for March 2023. According to the theatre, the plot is about "Mozart against modern beats, shrill dissonance against harmonic beauty. Inspired by the  fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes," the opera tells a story about pretence and truth and about the bonding power of music. The gardener and the rich heiress: Jonas and Leonie could hardly be more different. No wonder that the two can't stand each other. What unites them, however, is the dream of studying at the music academy. But Leonie's father, fashion mogul Rudolf Kaiser, thinks that her planned marriage to the renowned contemporary composer Anthony Swindelle will bring enough high culture into the family. Leonie decides to visit the university disguised as a boy, and comes  across Jonas there. Together they discover that Swindelle is pursuing some self-serving plans." Notable Performances, Recordings and Publications. Deutscher has played her own music as soloist with renowned orchestras across the world, including the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra (China), Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (Switzerland), Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's (New York). She has also given recitals of her own compositions in the renowned Lucerne Festival (Switzerland) and Aix-en-Provence Festival (France). At the invitation of the Austrian Chancellor, she has performed  at the Chancellery in Vienna on several state occasions, including in 2018 at a service commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe. Notable live performances include: Notable television appearances: Deutscher has appeared on television shows across the world, including "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", and NBC Today. The first album of Deutscher's music, "The Music of Alma Deutscher" was released in 2013 when she was 8. In 2019, Sony Classical Records released "From My Book of Melodies", a piano album of Deutscher's compositions from ages of four to fourteen. Two productions of her opera "Cinderella" has  been released on DVD, by Sony Classical and by the Vienna State Opera. Deutscher's collection of piano pieces, "From My Book of Melodies," was published in 2020 by American classical music publishers G. Schirmer and Hal Leonard.