The court minister arrives at the opera house to announce a royal ball whereat the Prince will choose a bride, but instead of leaving the family with the invitation, he mistakenly delivers a pharmacy prescription just given the king for his many ailments. The text is both down-to-earth and literary, with a predilection for Shakespearean couplets to end scenes.Ĭinderella lives with her stepmother and stepsisters in an opera house formerly run by her late father she spends her days drearily copying out scores for their stage performances. It started out in Hebrew, was translated into German for a Viennese performance in 2016, and ended up in English for the San Jose production. (Alma’s father, Guy Deutscher, is a linguist at Oxford University.) The libretto was a joint effort between her parents and various poets and dramaturgs. Deutscher and her parents conceived the ingenious plot it is tauter and more dramatically compelling than many a Verdian story. And the work is a send-up of the operatic genre itself, satirizing its conventions and singers’ foibles. The Prince, rather than seeking her out via her lost slipper, would track her down after the ball with one of her melodies.ĭeutscher’s ear vacuums up musical languages from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.ĭeutscher’s Cinderella is an alter ego for the composer like Deutscher, she is assailed by tunes that keep pouring into her head. When she started collecting musical ideas in 2013 for an opera, she modified the story to make the title character a composer. Showing a “you go, girl!” streak herself, she objected to the fact that Cinderella’s defining attribute was her small foot. Deutscher has been fascinated with the Cinderella story since age three a fantastically Fauvist drawing she made in 2011 depicts Cinderella and her two stepsisters with elongated limbs and torsos, swaying like exotic insects. Her opera, Cinderella, is a massive step forward in terms of musical and psychological complexity. Her piano concerto, which she premiered at the keyboard with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra in 2017, sounds like an amalgam of Muzio Clementi and Chopin, with some Donizetti thrown in for good measure. D.’s can do.”ĭeutscher’s ear vacuums up musical languages from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Now she can improvise complex stuff beyond what music Ph. At ten, she started learning orchestration. “At seven, she came back with something gorgeous. “At five you could say that her music was childlike but showed promise,” he says. Gjerdingen has been offering advice on her compositions since then. Robert Gjerdingen, a Northwestern University musicologist, wrote the book on Neapolitan improvisation that inspired Deutscher’s father to seek out the same training for his musically precocious daughter. Deutscher and her teacher, Tobias Cramm, improvise together across the Channel on their respective keyboards, turning phrases from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, say, upside-down and inside-out, experimenting with harmonies and modulations. A third of the music in colonial Williamsburg was composed by products of the Naples school. Young boys in a Neapolitan orphanage were efficiently turned into court and chapel musicians by improvising contrapuntal harmonies over bass lines. Since age five, she has been studying composition via Skype with a teacher in a Swiss village, who uses a method of training from eighteenth-century Naples. So let’s simply say that Deutscher is a phenomenal musical talent and that her parents are anything but exploitative, instead working zealously to protect her innocence. The phrase “child prodigy” produces revulsion in many people, conjuring images of trained human seals being exploited by greedy parents for financial gain. They are not, however, because Deutscher and her opera pose a conscious challenge to contemporary values in classical music and art. Given the current cultural imperative to champion “strong women” and “girl power,” you would think that Deutscher’s accomplishments would be widely known. It received a theatrically riveting production by California’s Opera San José this December, with the composer, Alma Deutscher, playing the violin, piano, and organ.
A twelve-year-old British girl has written an opera of astounding wit, craft, and musical beauty.
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