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Alma Deutscher premieres full length opera Cinderella at age 11

By Sarah Dingle

An opera composed by 11-year-old British girl Alma Deutscher has just had its world premiere in Vienna.

The accomplished violist and pianist wrote the work Cinderella at age 10.

A full length opera, it’s set in an opera house run by Cinderella’s wicked stepmother.

Alma played the music on piano for the first performance, which she said had been a long time coming.

“It’s really, really exciting because after all my work — composing it and then orchestrating it and then working with the singers, then finally working with the orchestra and the conductor — it’s actually now all coming together and coming alive,” she said.

Born in the UK to British and Israeli parents, Alma began composing from a very young age.

Her first attempt at composition was at age four when she began writing an opera about a pirate called Don Alonzo.

She composed her first opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, at age seven and gained national recognition when it only narrowly missed out on a place in the final of a contest for adults, held by the English National Opera.

She explained to America’s Today Show that moments of inspiration often struck her when holding her skipping rope.

“The funny thing is that when I try to get beautiful melodies and it usually never comes and my mind just goes blank,” she said.

“But when I am resting or even in bed or skipping with my rope, then melodies stream into my head.

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“For example, a few days ago when I was in bed resting in the middle of the night then I got this beautiful melody.”

Alma was able to pick out the notes on a piano at age two and at age three her parents gave her her first violin.

Her father, Guy Deutscher, is an internationally renowned linguist and amateur flautist, while her mother Janie was an organ scholar at Oxford.

The couple, realising their young daughter’s prodigious talent, moved the family to Surrey to be closer to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Cobham, where Alma takes piano and violin lessons.

‘I don’t like being called little’

Comparisons with Mozart are inevitable. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, probably the world’s most famous child prodigy, began composing aged five and was also 11 when he wrote his first opera.

But Alma Deutscher says she does not want to be known as another Mozart.

“I love Mozart very much, he’s probably my favourite composer, but I don’t really like it when people call 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.”

The first two performances of Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella are sold out, but the opera will run at Vienna’s Casino Baumgarten concert hall into the New Year.

Featured image: Wikipedia/Alex Nightingale Smith

This post originally appeared on ABC News.


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