Mozart ‘reincarnates’ in 7-year-old

MANILA, Philippines – To paraphrase an old Eagles song:

Where’ve you been lately? / There’s a new kid in the global scene / Everybody loves her / A musician-composer who’s not yet a teen

That pale riff on a classic rock nugget comes as the world — as opposed to just her cohabitants in the market town of Dorking, in Surrey, England — has started watching Alma Elizabeth Deutscher, featured recently on BBC News as the author of the opera “The Sweeper of Dreams.”

Alma who? The name does not ring a global bell yet, but it will, soon enough.

This because Deutscher is a burgeoning wunderkind who not only plays the exacting music of classical masters on piano and violin but has also composed a few classical pieces of her own, including the opera last July.

And she is just 7 years old. 

Extraordinario for piano and violin

The earth has spun countless times, such that we might just shrug our shoulders whenever a child prodigy gets discovered. 

Yet Deutscher is an extraordinary surprise in her own right, both as an individual and in the context of her creative and musical realms.

The handful of available international reports and resources present a compelling enough array of data.

Not the least of these is that Deutscher — born in 2005, the only child of Israeli-born linguist-professor-author-amateur flautist Guy Deutscher and his academic-organ scholar wife Janie — has been engaged in classical music since around 3 years of age, at one point attracted to a lullaby by Richard Strauss and wondering how such music can be so beautiful, according to mum Janie in the BBC News interview.

The very young Deutscher is said to have known piano notes by heart at age 2 and got obsessed with a toy violin her dad bought as a 3rd birthday present. 

After learning by heart and through a music teacher classical opuses such as sonatas by George Frideric Handel, Deutscher got bitten by the composing bug.

As early as 2010, she began writing music, including a piece titled “Lied” whose lyrics were supplied by a vocalist named Barbara Schneebeli and with piano accompaniment by Tobias Cramm. 

Deutscher the composer further took off in 2011, at age 6, by coming up with her instrumental “Andante for Violin” and the more complex “Sonata in E-flat for Piano,” which is divided into 3 movements — respectively titled Moderato, Fantasia and Rondo, totaling some 16 minutes.

This year, she added “Rondino in Eb for Violin,” a piece that accentuates her fondness for her favorite string instrument. 

A distinguished damsel

What really takes the cake so far is “The Sweeper of Dreams,” a 7-minute mini-opera that the 7-year-old Deutscher penned just last July.

It is based on The Calling, a script by Elizabeth Adlington that itself is based on The Sweeper of Dreams, a short story by fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman.

So in a year when we in the Philippines have heard the word opera in less exact contexts — namely by another England native, Morrissey, as a mocking reference to his own dramatic ditties at his May gig here, and in last month’s Manila staging of The Phantom of the Opera, which is actually a musical — we hear the real deal, an opera piece written by a young girl whose generational peers might not even know what a soap opera is, let alone a theatrical one. 

Not only does Deutscher manage to astound as she is and get a high commendation for her piece by the English National Opera, she also has the distinction of joining the very small historical circle of female opera composers, led by the pioneering, multi-talented Baroque era artist Francesca Caccini.

And this is before Deutscher is even eligible to drive or have her own Facebook account (a fan page did get made last Monday) or even if she is not yet tall enough for her feet to touch the floor as she sits across the family grand’s ebonies and ivories.

One fascinating femme

Mindblowing — this best sums up Alma Deutscher.

Her feats thus far have earned her comparisons to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, himself a musician, composer and child prodigy rolled into one as early as age 5.

And for Deutscher to be a “new Mozart” in this era of a million distractions at every turn, online and off, is a testament to the enormity of this girl’s achievement.   

Of course, it does help that one such distraction, YouTube, is hastening the general public’s awareness of Deutscher’s skills, especially through a dedicated channel that helps stress her compelling dexterity and superior musicianship. 

That Deutscher’s potential circle of imaginary friends would include Franz Peter Schubert, Franz Joseph Haydn and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault instead of, say, Barbie, Phineas and Ferb or Adventure Time’s Finn and Jake could also be enough for specialists to declare that prodigy equals scrutiny.

Scientists are probably salivating at a field day where they get the chance to (safely) explore Deutscher’s cerebellum, which is said to be crucial to preteen prodigiousness. 

Of course, the worldwide media is starting to circle its wagons around Deutscher, and it would be unsurprising if one or two are already camped out outside her family’s countryside abode. Heck, even London’s insurance companies could already be offering proposals at securing the young girl’s precious hands. 

Her fascinating growth as a formidable talent even echoes Limitless, the Neil Burger-directed Bradley Cooper starrer about a person with a curious intellect and boundless capacity for knowledge — although that 2011 film’s protagonist did take a fictitious mind-enhancing drug whereas Deutscher’s gifts appear to be divinely assigned. 

An inspirer of dreams

The UK’s The Telegraph quotes an ambitious Deutscher as wanting to be not just a prolific composer like Mozart but also a violinist of the rank of Itzhak Perlman and a pianist as preeminent as Daniel Barenboim — the latter two coincidentally of Israeli descent just like her father. The aforesaid BBC report also reveals that the kid is working on a concerto for cello as her next self-composed material. 

So in one fell swoop, this elementary-age gal proves to be an inspiration on many levels.

She is an inspiration to the general, music-loving public of various races and walks of life, who will often likely liken her to an angel — one who provides soaring, tender harmonies that are not just pleasant to the ears but also sing to the soul.

She is clearly an inspiration to adults, such that a book coauthored by Deutscher’s parents on how they have raised her is almost bound to be a bestseller.

She is an inspiration to fans of classical and opera music, who have now found a brand new icon to help perpetuate those enduring but little-heard genres in the face of disposable pop — they who might be giddy at the prospect of sonata, andante, arpeggio, et al. absorbed into children’s vocabularies. 

She is most certainly an inspiration to young girls, especially artistically inclined yet shy lasses who might have a talent or two, musical or not, to show to the world, too. 

Here’s hoping that the world would, in turn, be inspired as well to treat Alma Deutscher with continued respect and adulation, to help her attain a healthy balance between an ordinary childhood and an extraordinary career. – Rappler.com