Alma Deutscher

Alma Elizabeth Deutscher (born 19 February 2005) is a British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor.

A former child prodigy, Deutscher 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.

Alma Elizabeth Deutscher was born on 19 February 2005, in Basingstoke, England.

She is the daughter of literary scholar Janie Deutscher (née Steen) 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.

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.

Deutscher's music has been noted above all for the wealth and beauty of its melodies.

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?"

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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".

In 2017, a CBS-60 Minutes feature with Scott Pelley about Deutscher created a stir and won an Emmy Award.

She has lived in Vienna, Austria, since 2018.

In 2018, Deutscher moved with her family to Vienna.

She made her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2019 in a concert dedicated to her own composition.

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".