At the age of 11, Alma Deutscher, from Dorking, Surrey, is about to have her opera performed in Vienna. She has also met, and her virtuoso violin playing has been praised by, maestros such as Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta. She has performed at the Royal Festival Hall. But when I met her, she was dressed as a pedlar and delighted in selling me magic potions, newts, eyeballs et al.
If you are going to interview a child prodigy, then meet her at home on Halloween. That way you get the child as well as the prodigy. And boy do you get both with the entrancing girl Stephen Fry compared to another young genius after seeing her play in a family video on YouTube in 2012. He tweeted: “Simply mind-blowing. Alma Deutscher playing her own compositions. A new Mozart?”
The one person not overwhelmed by that description is little Miss Mozart herself. “I don’t want to be a new Mozart. That would be boring,” she tells me. “I want to be Alma Deutscher.”
She and her sister, Helen, 8, had changed out of their Halloween costumes, and Alma, now in normal 11-year-old gear, with an alice band in her hair, took me into the music room in her parents’ lovely house, which overlooks much of the surrounding countryside, and talked about her opera.
Well, actually, she gushed about it, in the way 11-year-olds do — another welcome reminder of her age. But first she sat at the piano and sang a few arias. And, wouldn’t you know it, she can sing beautifully, too. As I was to discover later, even the singing, on top of the composing and the violin-playing, is not the end of her talents.
Advertisement
The opera, to be premiered in Vienna just after Christmas, is called Cinderella, but it’s not your usual Cinderella. Alma has given it a few twists.
“So, the two sisters are pompous prima donnas,” she explains. “They have no talent at all! Cinderella is a composer. The prince is a poet, and she finds a poem of his, but she doesn’t know if he wrote the words. Cinderella has been up all night, and she is so tired, and suddenly she hears a melody and she can’t resist it.”
Alma sings: “Up in the sky, sounds from on high. Look how they rise, carefree and blithe.”
The next aria is “a sad ballad about a poor girl who is deluded enough to think that someone loves her”. She sings one of her arias in English, one in German. (Alma has versions of the opera in both languages, and is learning German.) She offers to sing it in Hebrew, too: she is fluent in the language and has performed a section of the opera in Israel.
Her father, Guy, is an Israeli-born academic. Her English mother, Janie, is also a teacher, though both have given up full-time work to concentrate on Alma’s career. Which isn’t to forget her younger sister. Also no slouch on the violin, and just as vivacious as her sibling, Helen recently performed alongside Alma at a fundraising concert at an Oxford college.
Advertisement
How long has her Cinderella opera taken to come to fruition? “I think I started to write it when I was eight. I wanted to put it on with my sister then, but a year and a half ago I made it into a proper piece.”
This isn’t Alma’s first attempt at the art form. “I wrote a 15-minute opera when I was six,” she mentions en passant. She also, as it happens, wrote a violin concerto at the age of nine.
I wonder, as one would with most 11-year-olds when talking about Cinderella, what she thought of the Disney film? “I haven’t seen the Disney film,” she says, “because I don’t watch television. We don’t have a television in the house.
“I love books,” she adds enthusiastically, citing CS Lewis and Lemony Snicket among her favourites. No TV or film at all, then? “I watch DVDs of opera. La traviata and Figaro are probably my favourites. They are musically so beautiful.”
Music has been in her head from an extremely early age. “I have always heard music, since I was two. I started to play the piano then, and I got a violin for a birthday present when I was three. I had heard this Richard Strauss lullaby, and I asked my parents, ‘How can music be so beautiful?’”
Advertisement
Her composing methods might have made Strauss gasp. Some music comes to her in dreams. “I get a theme, a melody, in my dream, then I get out of bed and write it down in my notebook.” But it’s her other inspiration that is surely unique. “I have a magic pink skipping rope with a long tassel that I wave around. No other kind of skipping rope works. It has to be the sparkly one, and I have to be in an improvising mood.”
Her meetings with the classical greats have left her not at all fazed, even though Barenboim told her: “Everything that can be learnt you already have.” She has simply been pleased to be treated as one of their peers. “Simon Rattle was so charming and funny,” she recalls. “He gave me the score he was doing and invited me to his rehearsals.”
Alma’s parents don’t send her to school, choosing to teach her at home alongside specialist violin and piano teachers. She declares with her usual, if disconcerting, self-confidence that she is more than happy with that. “I am home-schooled. In one hour, I learn what would take me five hours at school.”
The stuff of school, a diversity of subjects, a diversity of friends, is not lacking, she says. “I learn about history by reading biographies of composers. I have lots of friends, people who live round here, and we have play dates. And every year I go to a musical summer camp in Salzburg.”
Anyway, she runs her own classes in her garden. “I’ve set up a climbing school with my sister. When I’m with my friends, I don’t really talk about my concerts or anything like that. I talk a lot about my stories, and I teach them climbing trees, and I do cartwheels and handstands. I’m learning to walk on my hands.”
Advertisement
A part of each day is centred on the rather splendid treehouse in the old oak in the garden. “I love painting and drawing and writing stories. And every day I go to my treehouse, take a flask of hot chocolate and read. But I do spend six hours a day practising violin, piano and composing. And I’ve got to finish orchestrating Cinderella.”
Eleven year-olds tend not to use the word “feminist”, but when I mention the idea, she nods. “I especially like stories where the girls succeed despite being girls. My first opera had a girl who had committed a crime.
“There weren’t any girl composers in the olden days. Mozart’s sister and Mendelssohn’s sister were both talented. But Mozart’s sister had to stay at home and do knitting. I’m a composer and I’m a girl, and I write operas about girls succeeding.”
What does she see herself doing when she’s 21? Without a moment’s hesitation, she declares: “My future projects — well, I would like to compose a symphony, and already have one movement, and right at the minute I’m writing a book, which I want to publish and then make into a film and write the music for the film.”
The fantastical story in the book, told to me at lightning speed, seems to concern ghosts who ride “night-mares” (I particularly liked that conceit), breathing out flames to poison people’s sleep and give them bad dreams.
Advertisement
Was this going to be a whole book or a short story? “Oh, a book,” she says. “Actually, I plan a series of six books. I already know the ending.”
Mozart, eat your heart out.
Cinderella, Casino Baumgarten, Vienna, from Dec 29