In honour of International Women’s Day this week, I thought I would talk about an inspiring young musician, Alma Deutscher. Named a musical prodigy after her viral YouTube video where she had to compose a piano sonata in under one minute, Alma is taking the classical music world by a storm at only 18 years old!

Conductor Zubin Mehta has described Alma Deutscher as ‘one of the greatest musical talents today’. Conductor Sir Simon Rattle told the BBC: “Alma is a force of nature. I don’t know that I’ve come across anyone of that age with quite such an astonishing range of gifts. I haven’t really seen anything like it.”

Alma started playing the piano when she was two years old and the violin when she was three. At six, she completed her first piano sonata, and at seven a short opera, The Sweeper of Dreams. Aged nine, she composed a concerto for violin and orchestra. Her first full-length opera, Cinderella, has been produced on three continents to sold-out houses and standing ovations. Alma’s first piano solo album, ‘From My Book of Melodies’, was released by Sony Classical and is published by G. Schirmer.

Alma Deutscher received the European Culture Prize in a ceremony at the Vienna State Opera in 2019, and has been elected by the German Magazine Stern in 2019 as one of twelve ‘Heroes of Tomorrow’. In December 2019, Alma also made her debut in Carnegie Hall in New York, where the concert was dedicated to her own compositions.

Alma is a unique and extraordinary young woman with a great many talents, and it certainly inspiring to see someone who is only the age of a sixth former achieve so many great things in the music world. To finish, here is a lovely note Alma wrote in the introduction of her first piano book.

Dear Young Pianists,

I thought you might like to play some pieces by a composer who’s not a dead old man with a long grey beard who lived centuries ago, but a girl around your age who is alive right now. So I prepared this album of my own compositions especially for you. I have been composing since I was four years old. This album starts with the very first melody that came into my head, when I was four. And the most recent piece in it is a Tango that I composed last year, when I was sixteen. I hope you will like my tunes and have fun playing them! And who knows, maybe my pieces will inspire you to compose your own songs…   

Yours, Alma

Maki Gajic Murata, Composer in Residence

Photo by Alex Nightingale Smith