From a remarkably early stage Alma Deutscher displayed prodigious musical gifts, prompting observers to call the English girl “Little Mozart,” a label she and her relatives have consistently declined. By six she had completed a Piano Sonata in E flat major; at seven she finished the brief opera The Sweeper of Dreams.
She entered the world in February 2005 in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. Her father, an Israeli-born linguist, and her mother, a scholar of Old English literature—both devoted amateur musicians—first recognized her aptitude when, at twenty months, she sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with perfect intonation even though she could not yet form the words. She mastered musical notation before she could read text. Piano lessons began at two, violin at three, and within a year she was performing Handel’s violin sonatas. After she began writing down her improvisations, the same year brought the Andante for violin alongside the sonata. Larger forms followed swiftly: several piano trios and the short opera, whose libretto she fashioned from a Neil Gaiman tale. Her verbal abilities kept pace with her musical ones. Conventional schooling soon bored her, so she withdrew and has continued her studies at home. Public notice arrived when British comedian Stephen Fry posted a link to her YouTube channel at age seven; by 2019 the channel had accumulated nine million views.
Interviewers have pressed her on the sources of her invention, and she has described melodies arriving unbidden—sometimes while she jumps rope—yet requiring disciplined labor to shape into extended scores. At nine she turned to orchestral writing, producing the Dance of the Solent Mermaids and completing a Violin Concerto in G major that she revised at twelve. That same year she began her full-length opera Cinderella, finishing it at twelve; parts of the music reached her in a dream. She relocated the action inside an opera house. After the 2015 premiere in Israel she enlarged the orchestration, first to twenty players and later to forty-four. The work has since been heard in a German staging in Vienna and in an English production mounted by Opera San Jose in California under Jane Glover. Conductors Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter are among the distinguished musicians who have voiced admiration. A 2017 appearance on the American program 60 Minutes widened her audience. She performs her own music regularly across Europe, North America, and Asia, and in December 2019 she made her Carnegie Hall debut in New York. Her language remains firmly tonal, recalling the practices of Mozart and Mendelssohn. Asked why contemporary scores often embrace dissonance to mirror the world’s disorder and pain, she replied by asking why music should add to the ugliness already present.
