60 Minutes - 7/15/2018: The Monuments, Seaweed, Alma Deutscher

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

As debate over the takedown of Confederate monuments continues, Anderson Cooper examines why and when the statues went up in the first place. Lesley Stahl reports on a new type of farming -- with seaweed. Plus -- Scott Pelley introduces us to Alma Deutscher -- a 12 year old musician who is being called the "Second Mozart." Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Until last year, when to the cheers and jeers of onlookers, the Confederacy's most celebrated military hero was hoisted off its pedestal. Really what these monuments were were a lie. A lie in what sense? Well, in the sense that Robert E. Lee was used as an example to send a message to the rest of the country and to all the people that lived here that the Confederacy was a noble cause. And that's just not true. This is incredible. Mayor Landrieu agreed to show us what's become of Generals Lee and Beauregard. They've been gathering dust for more than a year. Wow. Welcome aboard.

Thank you. It's not often you get a ride to visit a farm on a boat. Here we go. But former fisherman Bren Smith, the nation's leading advocate for a whole new type of farming, ocean farming, asked us to join him as he headed out to his version of fields to plant his staple crop, a type of seaweed called sugar kelp. So are you a fisherman or are you a farmer? I'm a farmer now. What else are the pieces of what it is to be a fisherman?

It's to own your own boat, succeed and fail on your own terms, and have the pride of feeding our country. We cannot explain what you're about to hear. Science doesn't know enough about the brain to make sense of Alma. Alma Deutscher is an accomplished British composer in the classical style. She's a virtuoso on the piano and the violin, and she is 12 years old. People compare you to Mozart. What do you think of that? Of course I love Mozart, and I would have loved him to be my teacher, but I think I would prefer to be the first Alma than to be a second Mozart.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. It's hard to forget the violence that broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia last August when hundreds of white supremacists showed up to protest the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a Confederate hero of the Civil War. What happened that weekend reignited a national debate about what to do with some 700 other Confederate monuments in towns and cities across the country, mostly in the South. Earlier this year, we took a closer look at these monuments and were surprised to learn

not just when they were built and why, but who wants to tear them down and who doesn't. We began in New Orleans, where the culmination of then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu's crusade to remove four Confederate monuments looked more like a military operation than a construction job. When the city of New Orleans removed a giant statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general who ordered the first shots fired in the Civil War, they did it in the dead of night. Construction crews wore bulletproof helmets and vests, and police snipers were stationed on rooftops nearby. Mitch Landrieu says it was impossible to find a local company that would take the job. When we put the thing out to bid, the one contractor that got showed up had his life threatened.

He had his car bombed. His car was actually? His car was actually firebombed. Death threats were coming in, and so I couldn't find a crane. I could not find a damn crane. In New Orleans? In New Orleans. I couldn't find a crane in Louisiana.

Mayor Landrieu eventually found a contractor from out of state, and finally, after years of legal wrangling, took down four Confederate monuments. The last one removed was a 16-and-a-half-foot bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee. It had stood for 133 years. Until May 19, 2017, when, to the cheers and jeers of onlookers, the Confederacy's most celebrated military hero was hoisted off its 68-foot pedestal. In a city that I represent that's 67 percent African-American, to have a young African-American girl pass by that statue and look at it every day, I ask myself, am I really preparing for her a really good future?

Is she feeling like she's getting lifted up by the government, or is she being put down? I mean, I think the answer's pretty clear. Really, what these monuments were were a lie. A lie in what sense? Well, in the sense that Robert E. Lee was used as an example to send a message to the rest of the country and to all the people that lived here that the Confederacy was a noble cause. And that's just not true. This is incredible. Mayor Landrieu agreed to show us what's become of Generals Lee and Beauregard.

They've been gathering dust for more than a year. That's the first time I've seen them there. Is that right? They're pretty daunting. Hidden away in this hastily built plywood shed in a location we were asked not to reveal. And you can see they're in their Civil War gear, their military monuments. They're there to revere them for their military service in propagation of the Civil War. You look at these monuments, you would never know the Confederacy lost.

Well, that was the whole point. The whole point was to convince people that actually they won, and even in their defeat, it was a noble cause. And, of course, the whole point of this is to confront history. I mean, this wasn't an LSU-Alabama football game where it didn't matter who won or lost, and you just got bragging rights. I mean, we were talking about millions of people enslaved, 600,000 American citizens were killed, and they were trying to destroy the country.

The statue's final fate is unclear, but they're unlikely to ever be displayed again on public property in the city of New Orleans. I really did want to make a definitive statement as a white man from the South, as the mayor of a major American city at the dawning of the 21st century, that it's not unclear anymore about what the Civil War was about and who won and what the values are that we should really revere. After the removal of the statues in New Orleans and the violence in Charlottesville, cities, universities, and activists across the country began rethinking what Confederate monuments said about their values. Several were removed in Baltimore and also in Austin, Texas.

In Durham, North Carolina, protesters tore down a statue of a Confederate soldier outside an old courthouse. No state has more Confederate monuments to revere or revile than the Commonwealth of Virginia. In Richmond, the capital,

there's a contentious debate about what to do about five prominent Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. All these years later, the Civil War, in many ways, is still contested ground. This is contested ground. This is ground zero in this debate. Absolutely, in large part because it was the capital of the Confederacy. Julian Hader is a historian at the University of Richmond. Monument Avenue is not just a national tourist attraction, but an international tourist attraction. capital of the Confederacy. Julian Hader is a historian at the University of Richmond.

Monument Avenue is not just a national tourist attraction, but an international tourist attraction. Monument Avenue is like a Confederate walk of fame. There are the generals, Robert E. Lee and his horse, Traveler, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stewart, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and finally, Matthew Fontaine Morey, a somewhat more obscure figure who tried and failed to start a Confederate colony in Mexico. Those monuments in many ways are part and parcel of what we call the lost cause.

The lost cause, what does that mean? The lost cause, quite frankly, is just the Confederate reinterpretation of the Civil War. It's created almost immediately after the war ends by Confederate leadership. It was hard for a lot of people, in my estimation, to believe that their ancestors died and fought for an ignoble cause. 600 and some odd thousand people died in the Civil War, which is more Americans than died in the Second World War. And people had to make sense of that. Believers in the Lost Cause who raised money to build monuments in towns and cities across the country were often veterans or their widows and children.

Lost Cause ideology portrayed Confederate soldiers as heroes defending states' rights against Northern aggression and downplayed slavery's role in causing the war. The first Confederate statue on Monument Avenue wasn't built until 1890, 25 years after the Civil War ended. The last one went up in 1929. You've written that these statues serve white supremacy. Sure. And that, by the way, is a critical component of the lost cause. The idea that African Americans were not only happy slaves, but they were unprepared for freedom. The idea that African Americans were not only happy slaves, but they were unprepared for freedom. The idea that African Americans were helpless after the Civil War.

And in that way, it represents a continuation of the ways that whites think about black folks' intellectual abilities, not just during slavery, but shortly thereafter. In the years after slavery was abolished and the Civil War ended, what became known as Jim Crow laws were passed that made African Americans second-class citizens. There are laws that disenfranchise African Americans from the 15th Amendment's right to vote. There are laws that restrict their movements. They represent, more broadly, the attempt to reassert control over African Americans after the abolition of slavery. And these monuments are part of that?

Oh, absolutely. They're just as much a part of Jim Crow as they are of the Civil War and slavery. That's when they were built. They were built in the 20th century. Very few people seem to understand that these monuments were built during segregation. The monuments are just a symbol of the effort to ensure African Americans stayed maybe not in physical bondage, but in bondage political and economically in this country and in this city. Richmond's mayor, LeVar Stoney, created a commission last year on the future of

Monument Avenue. Those who chose to erect those monuments and the figures who are glorified in those monuments, they made some serious attempts to ensure that people who look like me would never hold any political office ever in Virginia. With Charlottesville, were you surprised at how many people were willing to come out and show their true colors, show their Nazi flags. I think it woke a lot of people up, not just here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but around the country. There have been protests in Richmond over the future of Monument Avenue. The city has already spent more than half a million dollars on security. Mayor Stoney says he wants the statues taken down. It is, for me, the greatest example of nostalgia masquerading as history.

It's not real history. Well, it's the fake news of their time. Well, he and I just disagree. They're a part of history. William J. Cooper says removing Confederate monuments is a mistake. He was a professor of history at Louisiana State University for 46 years and is a past president of the Southern Historical Association. One of the things that Mitch Landry said that stuck in my mind,

he said there's a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it, and that these statues are revering a false history. Well, it's not a false history. It's not a false history. A monument was put up there by real people who had real beliefs. Maybe we don't like their beliefs. But one of the things that bothers me most as a historian is what I call presentism, judging the past by the present, figuring that we're the only moral people,

that nobody else could be moral if they didn't think like we think. When you hear people saying that these monuments celebrate white supremacy, because that's sort of the common refrain. Well, when you say celebrate white supremacy, that's not incorrect. I mean, they do celebrate white supremacy, but they weren't put up to celebrate white supremacy. Really? No, they were put up to celebrate the Confederacy.

But if the statues do celebrate white supremacy, should they be up today? Well, should Mount Vernon be up today? Should we go burn Monticello down tomorrow? Certainly Thomas Jefferson believed in white supremacy. You're saying this is a slippery slope. It's a very slippery slope. I would say the difference, the critical difference between Washington and Jefferson and Lee, and men like Lee, is that while Washington and Jefferson were complicated individuals and by our standards thought about ideas in an intolerably anachronistic way,

they also baked into the Constitution the components that allowed people to dismantle the slave system. They built as much as they destroyed. I cannot say the same thing for the Confederacy. Professor Hader was appointed by Richmond's mayor to the commission that's going to make recommendations on what should happen on Monument Avenue. There are 75 million people in the South who are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. And who am I to tell them that they cannot celebrate their ancestor in a particular way? But I also have ancestors who were the victims of the slave system. And I see no reason why we can't find a usable way to tell two stories or tell multiple stories. That tell the truth.

Not a romanticized version of the truth. Where people are trying to absolve themselves from the deep inhumanities of what the Confederacy stood for. People who are willing to face down history for what it is, and all its ugliness, and all its beauty. Do you believe the statues should be removed? No. I'm a historian. And I think that the statues should stay with a footnote of epic proportions.

Essentially, you're suggesting... I'm suggesting we do a little bit of historical jujitsu. Right? I'm suggesting we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves. I think we lack imagination when we talk about memorials. It's all or nothing. It's leave them this way or tear them down, as if there's nothing in between that we could do to tell a more enriching story about American history. Historians call it recontextualization, the addition of

signs or markers with information about when and why the statues were built to help people see old monuments in a new light. So you'd like to see signs or placards or historical lessons somewhere around here? Right. Perhaps even on this sidewalk. So that as people approach the statue, they can read the story and they can understand the context in which it was built and the reason it was built. You could have a glass placard here and etched into that glass placard would be a story. and then when you look through it you can still see the lee monument but you see it through the lens of a more accurate historical depiction last year in a poll about monument avenue more richmond area residents said they

preferred some form of recontextualization over keeping the statues as they are or removing them so someone walking down monument avenue today what kind of a view do you think they would get about slavery, about the Civil War? I don't think they'd get much of a view at all. The only representation of an African-American you'll find on Monument Avenue is a statue of Richmond native and tennis great Arthur Ashe. He's surrounded by children

and holds a stack of books in his right hand and a tennis racket in his left. It was unveiled in 1996. In some ways, it's a proverbial middle finger to the other monuments. And believe me, this town exploded when they told the public that they were going to build the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue. A lot of people didn't want to build it. Oh, no. Whatever recommendations made by Julian Hader and the Monument Commission he serves on may have a limited impact. Unlike in New Orleans, the Confederate statues here may be protected by

state law, and the Republican-controlled Virginia General Assembly is unlikely to approve major changes anytime soon. One person who that might have disappointed is Robert E. Lee. Before he died in 1870, he was on record opposing the building of Civil War monuments in the North and the South. Wiser, he once wrote, not to keep open the sores of war. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Many of us think of seaweed as a nuisance. The slimy, sometimes smelly stuff that clogs fishermen's nets, gets tangled around our ankles in the ocean, and washes up unwanted on the beach.

Even its name, seaweed, implies something undesirable. And yet, as we first reported this spring, increasing numbers of fishermen, scientists, and foodies in the country are starting to look at seaweed very differently as a promising source of food, jobs, and help cleaning ocean waters. With rising global populations and limited space to expand agriculture on land, they are turning to the sea and its weeds as a new frontier. Welcome aboard.

Thank you. It's not often you get a ride to visit a farm on a boat. Here we go. But we were on board with Bren Smith, the nation's leading advocate for a whole new type of farming, ocean farming. We joined him on a cold day in December, the time of year he heads out to his version of fields to plant his staple crop, a type of year he heads out to his version of fields to plant his staple

crop, a type of seaweed called sugar kelp. Here it is. This is the farm. I can't see anything. The whole idea is it's down under the water, so it's the white buoys. Yeah. That's the edges of the farm. And the black ones? Black buoys are holding up a horizontal rope below the surface, so it's rows, kind of rows of crops. This is the seed. He showed us what looked like a tube covered in fuzz. Is that kelp? Yeah, these are the baby plants.

They're about 2 millimeters, and these are going to grow to 15, 18 feet by the spring. It's one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth. And unlike all those plants that grow in earth, seaweed doesn't need fertilizer or fresh water. It's what's called a zero input crop. So now we're just going to unravel it. Just attach the string it grows on to rope and suspend it eight feet underwater. And that's it, huh? That's it. In five or six months, that fuzz will look like this. This was some of his crop last year. Smith began leasing the right to farm this 20-acre plot of water in 2012 from the state of Connecticut. His was the first commercial seaweed farm in the state.

Now there are nine, with a half-dozen more in the works. We hope, you know, in 10, 20 years there are thousands of farmers doing this. We think it's the future, time to move out in the ocean, and luckily we can do it the right way. Smith spent most of his life working the oceans in what he now considers the wrong way, on industrial fishing boats, going after lobster, tuna, and cod. We were tearing up whole ecosystems with our trawls, fishing in illegal waters, and just really chasing fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea.

And you didn't think about the idea that you were depleting the population of fish. The oceans just seemed boundless. Boundless and bountiful. The sense of meaning of helping feed my country, you know, fishermen, there's some jobs, you know, coal workers, farmers, I think steel workers and fishermen where, you know, there are jobs that are soul-filling. You know, there are jobs that we write and sing songs about. And I just, I wanted that life and I still do. But that life was increasingly in peril. Cod stocks crashed due to overfishing. And after Smith reinvented himself cultivating oysters in Long Island Sound,

hurricanes Irene and Sandy hit, destroying his crop two years in a row. Bren was really on the verge of bankruptcy. Searching for a new career on the water, he sought advice from Charlie Yarish, a professor of marine biology whose lab at the University of Connecticut studies some of the thousands of different types of seaweeds. But there's only 20 globally that are actually farmed. They're not all edible. No, they're not all edible. Some of them actually are quite toxic.

We have now all these sprays. It was Yarish who suggested Smith consider sugar kelp, a local seaweed that gets planted after hurricane season is over, has a mild taste, and can also be used as animal feed and fertilizer. Seaweed for you was the light bulb. Yeah. The eureka moment. We can create jobs here.

We can protect and improve the environment. We don't have to make this choice. Yeah, that looks nice. Smith now operates one of the largest seaweed hatcheries in the country with tanks full of developing kelp spores and a processing room that comes alive in spring when he and his team bring in the harvest and get it ready for sale. Blanched in 170-degree water, kelp turns a vivid green and can then be sold fresh or frozen,

sometimes in the form of noodles. Smith's customers include Google for their cafeteria, Yale University, and several restaurants and wholesalers. He has sold out the last four years. But at this kelp farm across the country in the waters outside Seattle, producing food is almost beside the point. This is a test farm where Betsy Peabody of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund and a team of scientists are doing an experiment to see whether seaweed can help fight the growing problem of ocean acidification

caused mainly by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the seas. Roughly 25% of CO2 in the atmosphere is being absorbed into oceans. That is what we're getting from fossil fuels? From both carbon emissions, from deforestation. And I think initially people thought, well, thank goodness the oceans are taking up some of that carbon dioxide. But then scientists started to document that, in fact, when that carbon dioxide, but then scientists started to document that in fact when that carbon dioxide goes into the ocean, it causes chemical changes. Changes like increasing the water's acidity, as documented in the U.S. government's 2017 Climate Science Special Report.

The excess CO2 causes a decrease of carbonate ions, which many marine species use to build their shells and skeletons. Worldwide, ocean surface waters have become 30% more acidic over the last 150 years. And in the Pacific Northwest, the problem is compounded by currents that bring more carbon-rich waters to the surface. And that's where seaweed comes in. Kelp take up carbon dioxide like any plant does, and it just so happens to lose in the water. There are winners and losers in ocean acidification. Organisms that produce carbonate shells, like shellfish, they're a loser. They can't handle the lower pH. They can't deposit as much calcium in their shells. On the other hand, when seaweeds like kelp, they actually pick up that

carbon dioxide because now it's easier for them to do photosynthesis. Imagine trees on land pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. Well, seaweeds and kelp are really good at pulling CO2 out of the water. So basically what you're doing is the equivalent of planting trees in the ocean. Exactly. And then testing to see how much of a difference it makes. We've got scientific mooring buoys anchored at both sides. The yellow. The yellow buoys. They're measuring how water changes as it flows through the kelp field and seeing if baby shellfish grown with the kelp do better at building their shells. Results won't be in for more than a year

and Bren Smith is eager to see them. He's been growing shellfish on his kelp farm, too, but not, he admits, because of the science. He says it's good business. Yeah, you can just hold it there. Yeah? In November, he and his team loaded thousands of baby mussels into netting that look like massive sausages and then suspended them from ropes that hang down below the kelp. He calls it 3D ocean farming. Why 3D? We call it that because we're using the entire water column. And if you can stack crops on top of each other, it's just really efficient.

You don't use large plots of ocean, but you get so much food. So you've got your seaweed. Yep, you've got the kelp here, and then we have the mussels. Underwater, each row looks something like this. Off the same lines we have scallops, and then below the whole system we have cages with oysters in them. He brought up one of those oyster cages from the bottom to show us. What kind are these?

We call these Stimble Island salts. Let's haul some mussels. Andy hauled up a mussel line so we could see their progress, too. They're in bunches. These are about mid-size, so they'll double in size. We'll harvest these just about the same time we harvest our kelp. So this is going to be a big harvest. So are you a fisherman or are you a farmer?

I'm a farmer now, whether I like it or not. I'm an ocean farmer. And I talk to fishermen about this. I say, listen, we have to make this transition, that heartbreaking move from being a hunter to a farmer. But what else are the pieces of what it is to be a fisherman? It's to own your own boat, succeed and fail on your own terms, and have the pride of feeding our country. We get to keep those things. He's so convinced, he's launched a non-profit called Green Wave to encourage others to follow his lead. Husband and wife Jay Douglas and Susie Flores are among his seaweed farming disciples. A former Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Douglas learned the ropes, literally, on Smith's farm last spring, spent a year getting a permit for his own plot of ocean in Connecticut, and built 36 anchors from scratch. The day he and Flores went out to plant their first crop, Smith was along for guidance. I want to set this at an angle downwards. His nonprofit provides free seed and guarantees to buy 80% of their harvest for the first two years. He estimates that with a $10,000 to $20,000 investment and a boat,

new farmers can turn a small profit the first year, rising to well over $100,000 later on. Has anyone actually said, you know, you guys are a little nuts? Yeah. People just, yeah, kind of scratch their heads and say, what are you making all these anchors for? It's like, I'm starting a kelp farm. What the hell is kelp? Yeah, right. Why? Which raises a question for this whole endeavor. Will Americans in large numbers start eating seaweed? Just toss them in there, a little kelp. Chef and author Barton Seaver thinks so.

He's written a whole cookbook of seaweed recipes. When I hear the word seaweed, the last thing in my head is I want to eat that. You think they'll buy it out there? I do. I think, you know, 10 years ago, kale wasn't on the shelf. He says, first off, the name seaweed's gotta go. He prefers sea greens. So is this one of the dishes you created? This is an Italian dish that typically uses spinach. He suggests integrating seaweed, pardon, sea greens, into things we already know and like. Are you nervous that I might not like it? In front of all of America? No, not at all. No. Surprisingly, it didn't taste fishy or seaweed-y.

Annie says kelp is rich in calcium, fiber, iron, and antioxidants. That's really good. It is really good. This is what's exciting about this space. The oceans are a blank slate. From my generation, this is a really exciting moment. I can farm and grow food, but also I can soak up carbon and nitrogen while creating jobs, while giving people the opportunity to create small businesses.

And while fulfilling his dream of living his life on the water. Yeah, I want to die on my boat one day. That's sort of the goal. And I think if I look over my life, my goal is just always how do I keep working at sea? We cannot explain what you're about to hear. Science just doesn't know enough about the brain to make sense of Alma. Alma Deutscher is an accomplished British composer in the classical style. She is a virtuoso on the piano and the violin.

And when we aired this story last November, she was 12 years old. She's different from other prodigies we've known because at the age of 10, she wrote an opera which demands comprehensive mastery. Not just how to play the piano, but what is the range of the oboe what can a cellist play we don't know how she understands it all it seems that alma was born that way what is your earliest musical memory i remember that when I was three and I listened to this really beautiful lullaby by Richard Strauss. And that was when I really first realized

how much I loved music. And I asked my parents, but how can music be so beautiful? Do you remember the melody? Yes. You want me to sing it? Please. Please.

Those notes of Richard Strauss ignited a universe. At three, Alma was playing piano and violin. When did the composing begin? When I was four, I just had these melodies and ideas in my head, and I would play them down at the piano. And sometimes my parents would think that I was just remembering the music that I'd already had before. But I said, no, no, these are my melodies that I composed. Last year, in Austria, we watched Alma prepare her violin concerto and the premiere of her piano concerto.

Joji Hattori conducts the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Just the clarinet. Just the clarinet. What I really want to hear is the violin and the clarinet. That night, the soloist was the composer herself. And as you listen, remember, she wrote

all the notes for all the instruments. We could see Alma was living a story. A story of loss. Alma was living a story. A story of loss. Scales of emotion beyond a child. Music And yet her vision was almost like wisdom. Do you have any idea where this comes from? I don't really know, but it's really very normal to me to go around, walk around and having melodies popping into my head.

It's the most normal thing in the world. For me, it's strange to walk around and not to have melodies popping into my head. So if I was interviewing you, I would say, Well, tell me, Scott, how does it feel like not having melodies popping into your head? It's very quiet in my head I must say but it appears never quiet in hers look what happened when we took a break from filming at the Deutscher home never mind the background noise that's just the rustle of lunch. This is Idle Alma.

When she has nothing to do, the music flows from its mysterious source as fluently as breath. Do you feel that there's anything about Alma's gift that you don't understand? Her parents, Guy and Janie, are professors. She teaches old English literature, and Guy is a noted linguist. Both of them are amateur musicians. We don't understand creativity. Does anyone? I mean, I think that's the crux of the mystery. Where does it come from, these melodies popping into your head?

I mean, it really is a volcano of imagination. It's almost unstoppable. It was Guy who taught her how to read music. I thought I was an amazing teacher because, you know, I hardly had to... You thought it was you! I thought it was me. I hardly had to say something. And, you know, a piano teacher once said,

it's difficult to teach her because one always has the sense she's been there before. She wouldn't be able to imagine life without dreams and stories and music. That's as unimaginable to her as it is strange for other people to think about a little girl with melodies in her head. I love getting the melodies. It's not at all difficult for me.

I get them all the time. But then actually sitting down and developing the melodies, and that's really the difficult part, having to tell a real story with the music. The story Alma tells in her opera is Cinderella, but it's not the Cinderella you know. It seemed demeaning to Alma that Cinderella was attractive just because her feet were small. So she cast Cinderella as a composer and the prince as a poet. Cinderella finds a poem that was composed by the prince. And she loves it and she's inspired to put music to it. And in the ball, she sings it to the prince.

I think that it makes much more sense if he falls in love with her because she composed this amazing melody to his poem because he thinks that she's his soulmate, because he understands her. Well, people can fall in love with composers. Exactly. I think this may be one of those times. They fell in love with Cinderella in its first production in Vienna. There is another composer who had an opera premiere in Vienna at the age of 11. Mozart.

People compare you to Mozart. What do you think of that? I know that they mean it to be very nice to compare me to Mozart. It could be worse. Of course, I love Mozart and I would have loved him to be my teacher. But I think I would prefer to be the first Alma than to be a second Mozart. In Israel, Mozart joined Alma on stage. She played his piano concerto with a cadenza. In a cadenza, the orchestra stops and the soloist breaks away in music of her own making. It's something that I composed because it's a very early concerto of Mozart and the cadenza was very simple. It didn't go to any different keys and I composed quite a long one

going to lots and lots of different keys, doing lots of things on Mozart's motifs. piano plays So you improved the cadenza of Mozart. Well, yes. It's kind of a comet that goes by and everybody looks up and just goes, wow. Robert Yerdigan is a professor of music at Northwestern in Chicago. He has been a consultant to Alma's education. I sent her some assignments when she was six, seven, where I expected her to crash and burn because they were very difficult.

It came back, it was like listening to a mid-18th century composer. She was a native speaker. A native speaker? It's her first language. She speaks the Mozart style. She speaks the style of Mendelssohn. And the names that you just mentioned are the ones that live for centuries. Yes. She's batting in the big leagues, and if you win the pennant, there's immortality. The route to immortality leads through California. Last December, Opera San Jose staged Cinderella in Alma's American debut. She was the bell of the ball on the piano, organ, and violin. The piano music teachers say, oh, you must choose the piano.

And the violin music teachers say, oh, you must choose the piano. And the violin music teachers say, oh, you must choose the violin. But anyway, that's better than the piano teacher saying, you must choose the violin. Yeah, that would be a bad sign. That would be a bad sign, yes. Fortunately, she doesn't have to choose. This is her composition, Violin Concerto No. 1. It's extremely jolly, very happy and jocular, that movement. I want to make the people who listen to it laugh and be happy.

The first movement of the violin concerto is quite the opposite. It's very dark and dramatic. What does a girl your age know about dark and dramatic? Well, yes, that's an interesting question, because, you know, I'm a very happy person. So I have lots of imaginary composers and one of them is called Antonin Yellowsink. Antonin Yellowsink, Alma's imaginary composing friend, is an insight into the music of her mind alma told us that she made up a country where imaginary composers write each in his own style of emotion so how many composers do you have in your head i have lots of composers and sometimes when i'm stuck with something when

i'm composing i go to them and ask them for advice, and quite often they come up with very interesting things. Even though real world seems magical, the Deutschers move to the English countryside to be near a famous school of music. Alma is privately tutored and homeschooled alongside her sister Helen, who also knows her way around the piano and the treehouse. I usually don't ask people your age this question, but what have you learned about life? Well, I know that life is not always beautiful, that there's also ugliness in the world. That's why I've learned that I want to write beautiful music, because I want to make the world a better place. We cannot know how Alma Deutscher channels her music like a portal in time. But in a world too often ugly and too often overburdened with explanation, it is nice to take a moment and wonder.