Alma Deutscher, age 8, is a music prodigy who recently released an album of her own compositions. The Music of Alma Deutscher, featuring her works for violin, viola and piano, was the best-selling classical album last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. She has also written a short opera called The Sweeper of Dreams, and Alma recently finished a second opera based on the story of Cinderella.
All these accomplishments lead to inevitable comparisons with the young Mozart, who composed his first symphony at age eight.
Alma was born in England and lives with her parents in Dorking, Surrey. She started playing the piano as a two-year-old, the violin at age three. Her attempts at composition started by the age of four. Alma has said that sometimes beautiful melodies will stream into her head while she is jumping rope or resting.
The young composer visited the U.S. in late October and played some of her music on the Today Show and the Ellen Degeneres Show. She talked about the inspiration behind some of her music with Ellen DeGeneres:
"The beginning of my opera came as a dream," Alma said. "I dreamt that it was a beautiful piece by Mozart which he had written, but when I woke up, it turned out that it was actually me who thought about it in my dream."
Her opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, was performed this summer at a music festival in Israel, along with her piano trio. Music critic Noam Ben-Zeev wrote about this performance in Haaretz:
"If someone had accidentally entered the first half of the opening concert, he would no doubt have assumed that the Piano Trio was composed by a major composer, probably Viennese, from the early years of the nineteenth century. But no: It turns out that Deutscher, in a wondrous display of stylistic understanding and taste, composed the trio herself..."
In addition to her compositional gifts, Alma is also a prodigy on the violin and piano--thus why some would compare her to Mozart.
Alma Deutchser, however, is not pleased with that comparison.
During her appearance on Today, she said: "I love Mozart very much. He's probably my favorite composer. But I don't really like hearing people calling me Little Miss Mozart because I don't like being called little. I'm very big! And secondly, if I just wrote everything Mozart wrote again it would be boring. I want to be Alma, not Mozart."
