Her story is extraordinary – and well known, with details of her early life often being recounted by journalists with the same breathlessness as a preschool teacher telling a fairy-tale. It is an unusually heavy conversation with which to engage an 18-year-old, but then Deutscher is not your ordinary 18-year-old. I would never tell anyone what they should like.” Personally, The Rite of Spring doesn’t speak to me, but I know it speaks to a lot of people. “Everyone is entitled to their own tastes, of course. I can’t define what beautiful is,” she tells me. One journalist for Munich radio station BR Klassik said that the opera’s mission to promote tuneful music was “reminiscent of the agitation against so-called ‘degenerate music’ ” in Nazi Germany, a nasty provocation particularly given Deutscher’s heritage (her father, Guy, a Cambridge-educated linguist, is Israeli-Jewish).Īnd yet while Deutscher is obsessed with melody, she does relent when I suggest that some people might actually like the dissonant, atonal stuff. I want to free audiences from this repression, and to liberate composers, otherwise the art form doesn’t stand a chance.”ĭeutscher fixes me with a hard stare which suggests no small amount of ideological zeal, and following our interview, the subject which she is so passionate about and which pervades her latest work causes some criticism among the German press. If a piece of music sounds like noise, that is because it is noise. The modernist noise she parodies in the work is there because she wants to “start a revolution. Melody is considered inferior, but for me it is the most noble thing in the world.” It has to be beautiful or powerful or uplifting, or even make you sad. “Ultimately, music has to touch your heart. ![]() For Deutscher, the fusion of melody and harmony are the ideal. The work sees two gifted teens from opposite ends of the social spectrum accepted into an elite music college, where the odious teacher-composer Sir Anthony Swindelle (the girl’s fiancé) tells the boy that his melodic pop compositions are total trash. ![]() Her new opera-cum-musical, The Emperor’s New Waltz, premiered in Salzburg at the weekend and is something of a broadside against music “that only clever people like”. “I want to save classical music from dying.” Alma Deutscher, the little girl whom the press relentlessly labelled “the new Mozart”, has turned 18 and is putting away childish things.
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