Alma in wonderland!

Vienna / DPA

Music comes to Alma Deutscher when she dreams. “I sometimes get a melody in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and I sneak out of bed and I write it down in my notebook,” the British girl says.
Like many 11-year-olds, Alma also has a vivid imagination when she is awake, but unlike most children, she uses it to compose classical music.
“Cinderella,” her first full-length opera, premieres in Vienna in late December, and Alma has been spending weeks away from home to work with professional singers and musicians in the Austrian capital.
She is often labelled as a child prodigy, as she not only composes but also performs on the violin and piano. Media have compared her to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who also started playing and writing his own music at a very young age. With supreme confidence, and childlike logic, Alma dismisses such claims.
“If I composed everything that Mozart had already composed, if I was just a little Mozart, then that would be a bit boring.
“But it’s much more interesting to be Alma,” she says, sitting in the bright living room of an elegant villa in Vienna where a local record producer is hosting her and her family for the duration of the rehearsals.
With similar self-assurance, Alma Deutscher decided that she did not simply want to set Cinderella’s famous fairy tale to music, but that she would create something of her own.
Her Cinderella character is a musician, just like herself. “I didn’t want her to be a pretty girl who cleans and keeps quiet. I wanted her to be clever and a composer,” Alma says.
The words pour from her mouth as she excitedly explains the plot.
Her 2-hour version is set in an opera company that is run by Cinderella’s evil stepmother. The prince of the original tale becomes a poet, while the stepsisters become pompous primadonnas who sing complicated arias that highlight their difficult characters.
How does an 11-year-old get to write and orchestrate an opera that at times echoes various classical and romantic composers, while sounding original as a whole?
Alma’s father Guy Deutscher, an Israeli linguist, says that he and his wife Janie Deutscher noticed that their daughter could sing at perfect pitch when she was not even 2 years old.
“We noticed very, very early on that there is something very special about her relationship to music,” says Guy, whose quiet manner stands in contrast to his daughter’s energy.
When she was about 4, she started developing her own melodies, and from then on, his feeling grew that “you can’t teach her anything because she’s always known it before.”
Guy, an avid amateur flautist, taught at Oxford at the time. There, he asked around if anyone would help him give his small daughter a musical education.
“Of course everyone laughed at me,” he said.
Eventually, he found someone in Switzerland who is specialized in a method that was used in Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries to teach children composition in a playful and improvizational way.
Alma gets lessons from this teacher via video link once a week, and she has also been learning with Joerg Widmann, a German composer and clarinetist.
Despite this formal training, Alma develops her melodies when she plays, jumps or sleeps and gets lost in her imagination.
When Alma skips with her skipping rope, her mind sometimes wanders off into an imaginary country that she calls Transylvanian.
One composer who lives there is Antonin Yellowsink, a musician appointed to the country’s imperial court. “Sometimes what he composes is so beautiful that I’d rather write it down,” she says.
Turning such melodies into a complex and sophisticated opera is hard work, Alma admits.
“Cinderella” was first performed in a shorter chamber version last year in Israel, but the young composer has added a lot of new material and has fully orchestrated her work for its Vienna premiere.
“I love starting compositions. That’s very fun. But then finishing them is the difficult bit,” she says with a laugh.
After all, Alma does not spend all of her time making music. She is home-schooled by her parents, and she also likes to dance, read, write stories, and to climb trees with her friends in her home in southern England.
“I think that she is allowed to be a child to a much bigger extent than children who go to school,” says Dominik Am Zehnhoff-Soens, the young German director who is staging “Cinderella” in a music and events venue, the Casino Baumgarten.
“She is allowed to develop her full potential and to live out all her wishes and fantasies,” he said.
A few hours later, Alma sits at the piano to work with a cast of young singers and with the Brazilian-born conductor Vinicius Kattah, while Alma’s younger sister Helen turns the pages of the music score.
Some of the singers belt out high notes that sound like Wagner, some parts of the composition have the lyrical tone of Schubert, while other sections sound like playful 19th-century operettas. A few times, a few modern elements even creep into the score.
However, Alma Deutscher has not put together a hodgepodge of musical styles, but has thought very carefully about every melody and phrase.
She confidently asks for a warmer and deeper tone here, demands a Puccini-type singing style there, while explaining the inner feelings of her characters to her singers.
The German soprano Theresa Kruegl sings the title role. “For me, it is music that goes straight to the heart,” she says. “Maybe it’s time that we got music that is not cerebral,” she adds, referring to contemporary compositions that are unpopular with many opera singers.
A little earlier, Kruegl rehearsed a love duet with Lorin Wey, who sings the prince.
Wey sounded triumphant, but that was not what Alma Deutscher had in mind.
Cinderella and the prince have already found each other when they sing, she explained.
“Now he is almost in nirvana. That’s how I imagined it,” she said, asking him to sing it again, but more calmly.
As he did, the music turned from an operatic aria into a tender love song. “It’s beautiful,” Alma said.