Thought for the Week

I was listening to Radio Four as I drove to Glasgow when a news item came on about a young girl called Alma Deutchser. I soon became totally absorbed in the wonder of the story of this young girl. Alma was born in 2005 and when she was two she started playing the piano.

She could play the violin by age three and by the time she was four she composed an opera about a pirate called

When she was six she composed her full piano sonata and at seven she composed a short opera called:

There followed various compositions for violin, piano and chamber ensembles.

Aged nine, Alma wrote a concerto for violin and orchestra which she premiered in 2015. Aged ten, Alma wrote a full length opera,

A chamber version of the opera was performed in Israel in 2015, and the full version will be premiered in Vienna in December 2016.

I heard her interviewed and she came over as a lively, articulate, charming and intelligent young woman, yet with the freshness and enthusiasm of a child.

Her father said that when she was just three, she heard a lullaby by Richard Strauss, and came to him and said: ‘How can music be so beautiful?’

Daniel Barenboim, who nurtures an orchestra of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians, said of her: ‘Everything that cannot be learned, she already has.’

Alma has a zest for life and a desire to encourage young people to come together in the universal language of music.

At a time when our world is immersed in so much violence and sadness, this is a noble ideal and one we should embrace.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy said: ‘We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.’

If only the world could sing the same song, maybe the dream of peace would come true.