Mature debut for a prodigy
Alma Deutscher is an 11-year-old girl from Dorking in Surrey. She may look like a thousand other Home Counties girls, pig-tailed and smiley, but Deutscher is definitively not like other children. She composed her first piano sonata at the age of six, completed her first opera by seven, and, at nine, wrote a concerto for violin and orchestra. Now, a couple of months before her 12th birthday, Deutscher has enjoyed the world premiere of her first full-length opera,
Cinderella, in Vienna. The opera was developed with the encouragement of the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, who, several years ago, hailed Deutscher as a “genius” and he proved essential in finding a home for the young girl’s opera in the European capital of music. It is clear that Deutscher is a phenomenon. On the night of Cinderella’s premiere, autograph hunters formed an orderly queue around the long, white hall of Vienna’s Casino Baumgarten, a mid-sized venue that has played host to, among others, Lang Lang and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, a BBC film crew hovered on the sidelines under the aegis of Alan Yentob – Deutscher will be the subject of a documentary in his Imagine strand, due out this summer. Is all of this too much, too young? Certainly the normal cautionary tales applied to young stars seem unlikely to apply to Deutscher, due to a stable home life and the unquestioning support of her parents, Guy and Janie, and little sister Helen. She is a confident girl, certainly, but unaffected and, in Cinderella, she proved to be a calm and graceful performer (she plays piano and violin at various intervals) without a trace of first-night jitters. The marketing of Cinderella (which began its four-night run on Thursday) proves that the Deutschers are keen not to promote Alma as a mini-Mozart. Any Viennese citizen buying tickets for the opera will gain no clue from the posters that its composer is a child: you have to start reading the programme to realise that this is the case.
But Cinderella proves that Deutscher is an extraordinary talent. Prodigy is a much misused term, but the maturity of her composition would suggest that, for once, it is not mere hyperbole. That a young girl could have the mental energy to compose a two-hour opera and take credit for its full orchestration is staggering; that the end result is a lively, coherent piece of comic opera is exceptional.
Deutscher began to write Cinderella when she was seven years old and, in a way, you can see its progression – with the end result a sort of palimpsest of musical influences. Mozart’s Magic
Flute is there, as are the lieder of Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Wagner at his most romantic. This, of course, would suggest derivation, but it equally shows the magpie mind of someone who is biding their time while they work out their own particular creative voice. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Deutscher is that she is able to sustain a considerable emotional power in her music (illustrated in Cinderella’s lovely, cinematic overture) despite being untroubled by the vicissitudes of adult life.
Deutscher is not always well-served by Oh!pera’s production, which occasionally suffers from an aesthetic tweeness (crotchets and minims float around on a screen behind the performers), and there is sometimes a lack of fluidity between scenes. But the libretto (co-written by Deutscher and four others) is sprightly, and her original concept shows a fertile mind that sometimes borders on the satirical.
The wicked stepmother (played by Catarina Coresi) is reimagined as a prima donna who is well past her prime, while Cinderella’s family home is an opera house that lurches into crisis when her father dies and the stepmother asserts control. These points are never laboured and Deutscher displays a lightness of touch in shaping them into the fabric of her story. Meanwhile, Cinderella’s golden slipper has been jettisoned in favour of a musical chord that will melt the Prince’s heart. It’s an effective move which shows that Deutscher has a considerable confidence in asserting a musical motif that will have a powerful effect on all those who hear it.
At the end of the evening, the little girl in the red dress received a standing ovation, and hearty cries of “Bravo” rang out across the hall. Enough flowers were laid at Deutscher’s feet for the girl to be able to open a florist’s shop, should she choose not to pursue a career in music.
That is flippancy, of course, but I was nevertheless left wondering what Deutscher will do next. She is on the cusp of puberty and may suddenly pursue other interests, although her strength of purpose makes this seem unlikely. Cinderella is a fairy tale with a happy ending. Deutscher’s own fairy tale, you sense, is just beginning.
‘Remarkably, she is able to sustain a considerable emotional power in her music’
Until Jan 5. Tickets: Cinderella-in-vienna. com