(Photo Credit: Benjamin Ealovega)

According to renowned conductor Zubin Mehta, Alma Deutscher is “One of the greatest musical talents today.” According to others, she is comparable to Mozart, a former child prodigy, British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor, who started playing music at the age of two and who could read music before she could read words.

Her music has been noted above all for the wealth and beauty of its melodies. OperaWire caught up with Alma, via video-link, where she was on a brief break in Los Angeles.

OperaWire: I know you resented having been called a “prodigy”, but I was interested in knowing how you would describe someone who started playing the piano at the age of two, the violin at three, composing at five, and writing an opera at seven?

Alma Deutscher: I always hated the term as a small child. It was incredibly frustrating because I always wanted to do everything as well as the grown-ups and to be taken seriously. In general, I thought that I was normal, because I didn’t know anything else and it seemed very normal to me to have the urge to compose and to play the piano and play the violin. But this label was something that I definitely had to struggle with. Sometimes when I would work with adult musicians, they would think: why do we have to work with this little girl? But when they heard my music, they would see that I knew what I wanted and that I really had composed the music and then we would get on very well and they would change their attitude. It’s easier now because I’m older, and also as a conductor, so it’s quite different.

OW: But I also think you DO have to acknowledge now that you very clearly have very unique gifts. I’m not going to make comparisons with Mozart as others have, but I can think of no one really and truly with the talents, not just the talents, but the potential that you have also. You are just 19 years old and most people who go on to achieve, as you know yourself, in this industry haven’t really even started a career at this age. And you’re kind of a veteran now.

AD: As a composer it helps very much to start young. And also to learn harmony when you’re young. It’s like learning a language: if you learn it when you’re young then it feels “native”.  If you only start when you get to university, it may already be too late.

OW: So give me a brief history, academically, of how you’ve progressed. I know you have been studying conducting in Vienna. Are you still studying there?

AD: Yes, I’ve been studying conducting in Vienna since I was 16. But going back earlier: when I was a child, I learned harmony and improvising through this amazing Italian pedagogical system, called Partimenti, which is a bit like figured bass, but without the figures (the numbers). I started when I was five. In this system, you get a bass line, and you improvise the harmony on it and then the melody on top. It starts really simple, and then it gradually gets more and more sophisticated until you improvise fugues. And it’s an amazing way to learn as a child because it’s fun. You’re creating something, it’s not just dry theory, you’re not analyzing or writing anything, you’re improvising something new every time. And it’s how all the great Italian composers learned, up to Puccini.

OW: And did you go to university prior to Vienna?

AD: No, in fact I’d never gone to school before. So that was my first experience of a classroom. And I loved that very much. Also, the whole experience of being in university, friends and colleagues, and great teachers, I really enjoyed that.

OW: So, you’re currently in rehearsals for “The Magic Flute”, in which you’re going to be conducting at the Opera San Jose. How is that going? And I have to ask, do you have something in your mind that you want to bring to this which you think is new?

AD: The rehearsals are going very well. I love working with all the singers. Everyone is so motivated and excited, which is wonderful. The greatest challenge with “The Magic Flute” is the over-familiarity of the music, which can sometimes blind us to how amazing the music really is. So the challenge is to make the performers and the listeners feel that they are listening to it for the first time. Because if we listen to it with fresh ears, we discover how amazing it is.

OW: I have tried so hard to enjoy Mozart and I’m very clearly missing something.

AD: (Laughing) “The Magic Flute” or just generally?

OW: I think maybe it’s because I love the music from the romantic era, so much, and Mozart is of a period before that when the structure of things was different. I reviewed “Don Giovanni” this year and I quite enjoyed it, I have to say, but it just doesn’t move me in the way that Puccini or Verdi or Massenet or someone from that era does. I think I feel like I’m missing something or, as I wrote in a recent review when I reviewed the opera; “it’s not Mozart it’s me”.

AD: One problem is that a lot of the time Mozart tends to be played as if on autopilot. I also think that people don’t bring out enough of the drama in the music when they interpret Mozart, perhaps because they think it all has to sound uniformly elegant and graceful. And perhaps this is part of the reason why you and many other people don’t find it exciting enough. Also, as I mentioned, it doesn’t help that his music is so over-familiar. Most of us have known “Magic Flute” almost all our lives. I saw “The Magic Flute” for the first time live when I had just turned three, in the Salzburg Festival. And then I had a DVD of it and I became quite obsessed with it. And I remember how in the scene when Papageno wants to kill himself I would get so scared that I would run out of the room, and I would hide myself in the cupboard and refuse to come out. (laughs). So, going back to your question, when you know something from such an early age, there is a risk of over-familiarity.

But there are amazing things in “The Magic Flute”. For example, it has such an incredible range of musical styles. Of course, there are Papageno’s tunes, which sound like catchy childish songs. But in the same opera, you have chromatic counterpoint over choral-like music, which Mozart composed after intensely studying Bach. Also, it’s incredible how Mozart makes the music flow, especially in the Finales, depicting different emotions and situations. It’s done in an amazing way, it’s practically like film music. And the music has these incredibly fluid transitions between different emotions, between farce and drama, and all done seamlessly.

That can be also quite a challenge because if you’re not careful, the music can flow too smoothly; without us even having had time to digest the jokes or the ideas. So sometimes as a conductor I actually try to make the transitions more marked to bring out the drama. Anyway, please come to a performance, maybe you’ll change your mind. (Laughs)

But of course, I’m not saying that everyone needs to love Mozart above other things. I personally feel so close to his musical language because I grew up with it. So, when I sight-read Mozart, then generally I can guess what’s going to come on the next page and I don’t even need to look carefully at each note because I know what he would have meant, so I just play what sounds right to me. I feel very close to his language. And that gives my relationship to this type of music a real intimacy.

OW: Some of your critics have said that you write tonal music, and you famously responded: “I want to compose music that I find beautiful”. I guess you’ve partly answered my question in our previous questions, but I would ask what other music do you find particularly beautiful, which you think perhaps resonates with your own psyche?

AD: There’s so much… and I’m discovering all the time… but I would say that in general the composers that resonate most with me are both those that have beautiful melodies, whether it’s Mozart; Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Verdi, but also so many others – it’s impossible to give a list, and also those composers who have particularly expressive and beautifully emotional harmonies, such as Bruckner. Richard Strauss has also been a big inspiration to me. But it’s impossible to give a list or to rank them.

OW: You mentioned earlier about anticipating what Mozart was thinking when he was writing. Do you find yourself listening to these composers and trying to get into their minds also?

AD: Oh definitely! If I’m studying a piece or even if I’m just trying to relax and listen to a piece in a concert, my mind is still constantly working… I follow the harmonies all the time and I keep wondering: why did the composer do this or that? With Mozart in particular, I would have loved to go back in time to meet him; and ask him all these questions: why did you do this strange modulation here? Is it because you got stuck and had to get back to the original key quickly? And see what he says! (laughing). I would have also loved to have had him as a teacher.

OW: I almost get the sense that your first language is music. It’s almost like you communicate, emotionally, better with music than the written word.

AD: Definitely, I could read music long before I could read letters. Which is quite funny because in my violin lessons when I was four, I remember my violin teacher saying: “Don’t you see it says “Allegro” here, so it should be faster!” But I couldn’t read letters then… (Laughs)

OW: I get the sense that you’re probably always composing or trying to compose. Talk me through a typical day. I can’t imagine a day when you’re not thinking about your latest project.

AD: Well at the moment it’s extremely intense with “The Magic Flute” because I have almost whole-day rehearsals and it will get even more intense this week because from tomorrow I have my first orchestral rehearsal and that’s when it really gets exciting, because then it’s really about the interpretation and about shaping the whole piece musically. But I’m always trying to compose on the side, whether I’m just improvising at the piano or working on a musical, I’m always busy.

But in the next two weeks, my main goal and concentration is to make “The Magic Flute” as beautiful as I possibly can.

OW: One of my favorite things that was written about you when you were younger, you famously created “Transylvanian” as this magical place that was an inspiration. And I wondered now, at 19 years of age, does “Transylvanian” still exist?

AD: Well, I still have my skipping rope, and I still sometimes occasionally skip with it, although less often than I used to. If I’m on my own, I don’t skip with it, but I would still wave it around as a way of relaxing and dreaming.

OW: And just to clarify for our interview, I know that your skipping rope served as a kind of… I don’t know…how could we describe it?

AD: A composing tool. It used to be my biggest composing tool, and I called it my magic skipping rope and I even thought it may have been the skipping rope and not me who produced the melodies. And at some point, I grew out of it a little bit, but it still remained a way of relaxing and composing. Sometimes if I’m on a walk and I have my skipping rope, a solution to a passage will pop into my mind, or just a new tune. I used to write stories about the composers who lived in “Transylvanian” and it was often quite helpful for me because if there was a melody by a Transylvanian composer that I particularly liked, I could “steal” it and use it in my own music. It inspired me to have this wide range of characters with different lives who composed in different ways. I now need it less than I used to, but I still have my skipping rope.

OW: After “The Magic Flute”, what’s next for Alma?

AD: I’m conducting quite a few concerts in Vienna and I’m working on a musical, a romantic comedy. That’s a very exciting project. I’ll finish university this year. And I’m going to compose a ballet for a company in LA. A symphony is also somewhere on the list.

OW: Do you find anything in modern music that can touch you the way that classical music can?

AD: I like melodic pop music. For me, the most important part of music is having a catchy melody. I sometimes do musical challenges on social media, where I take famous pop songs, and I hide them by doing classical improvisations over them and people have to guess what the hidden melody is. I think good pop music is much more similar to classical music than atonal music is.