Alma Elizabeth Deutscher ( ; born 19 February 2005) is a British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor. She composed her first piano sonata at the age of five; at seven, she completed the short opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, and later wrote a violin concerto at age nine. 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, Austria, since 2018. She made her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2019 in a concert dedicated to her own compositions.
Background and education Alma Elizabeth Deutscher was born on 19 February 2005, in Basingstoke, England. She is the daughter of literary scholar Janie () 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's 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, a television program hosted by renowned pianist and pedagogue Arie Vardi, featuring performance and improvisation by Deutscher 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 2017, a CBS-60 Minutes feature with Scott Pelley about Deutscher created a stir and won an Emmy Award.
In 2018, Deutscher moved with her family to Vienna. She explained to The New York Times in 2019: "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 have been 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 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".
From a young age, Deutscher has repeatedly stated her determination to compose beautiful music and bring back melody and 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".. Retrieved 1 March 2017. 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 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." She has elaborated on this theme in interviews with The New York Times in 2019 and The Times in 2022, as well as in a speech at the Vienna State Opera in 2019, on the occasion of receiving the European Culture Prize, where she said: "there is more to European Culture than just dissonance. Perhaps there is also a place in European Culture for harmony." In an interview with German Radio after the premiere of her third opera in 2023, Deutscher explained: "So that an art form stays alive and doesn't become a museum of holy relics, you always need something new and fresh. But you need new music which speaks to people, which moves them, which brings them solace, which entertains them".
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 of perception of her as a 'prodigy' and of 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.