60 Minutes - Sunday, August 11, 2019

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

Anderson Cooper reports on how the Chinese government recruited a former CIA case officer. An architect who constructed an ideal life relearns his craft after going blind. Lesley Stahl reports. Scott Pelley sits down with a 12-year-old violin and piano prodigy. 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

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. The Grady Mustard Exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Does the Mallory case fit a pattern that you're seeing coming from Chinese intelligence? Yes. We currently have three pending cases against former intelligence officers,

and they're alleged to have been spying on behalf of the Chinese. It's hard to overstate how unusual it is to have three cases like this ongoing. It's not unusual. It's unprecedented. Kevin Mallory was a former clandestine case officer for the CIA, who the Justice Department believes was recruited by a Chinese spy. Did you send them anything on that phone? I sent some tests. Tonight, 60 Minutes gets an insider's view at what espionage looks like. Chris Downey had constructed the life he'd always wanted, an architect with a good job, that whole exterior. Happily married and coaching his 10-year-old son's little leaf. But then something awful happened. He went blind and that threatened to end his career. Is that sufficiently different?

Oh yeah. Or did it? I'm a kid again. I'm relearning so much of architecture. It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture. It was about what I had been missing in architecture. It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture. It was about what I had been missing in architecture. 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 Elma 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. What's your next adventure?

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Kevin Mallory was a down-on-his-luck former clandestine case officer for the CIA when he was approached by a man the Department of Justice believes was a Chinese spy. Officials say Mallory was a prime target for recruitment. He was out of work, three months behind on his mortgage, and thousands of dollars in debt. But as we first reported in December, and as the Chinese would discover, Kevin Mallory wasn't exactly James Bond. The Department of Justice agreed to show us how they caught Mr. Mallory and why they believe his recruitment by China is part of a massive clandestine campaign to steal not just national security secrets from the U.S. government,

but industrial and technological secrets from American companies. This is what espionage looks like. The man standing on the right in the yellow shirt is Kevin Mallory, who once held a top-secret security clearance while working for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Footage from a surveillance camera at a Virginia FedEx store in April of 2017 caught him as he prepared to hand a clerk stacks of classified documents to be scanned onto an SD card, the kind that can be inserted into a mobile phone. So this is the rare moment, right, in an investigation and in an espionage case where we actually have video footage of the individual preparing the classified material

for transmission to the Foreign Intelligence Service. We watched the tape with Ryan Gaynor, the FBI's supervisory special agent who investigated Mallory, and Jennifer Jelly, who prosecuted the case against him for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. They say Kevin Mallory sent national security secrets to a Chinese spy on a covert communication device. So here you see him talking with the store clerk about the scanning job. And throughout this video, you see little pops of yellow, little yellow pieces of paper that flash by when he's showing the documents. That was important for us because the document that he successfully passed

consisted of a typed up white piece of paper. That was the classified information, followed by two yellow sheets of paper with his handwriting on them. And here you can see... So those are the yellow sheets of paper? You can see the yellow sheets going through that scanning process. Prosecutors say some of the information Mallory sent could have revealed the identity of a couple who had secretly spied on China for the U.S. It was a very personal betrayal. Mallory had supervised the couple years before.

He was betraying people. This is people's lives at stake. Correct. These were documents that specifically talked about human beings whose lives could be in danger. If they had traveled to China, they could have been arrested. At the time he gave the information to the Chinese intelligence officer, he knew they were planning on traveling to China. John Demers is the top official in charge of the Department of Justice's National Security Division,

which helps guard the U.S. against terrorism, cyber attacks, and espionage. He's responsible for coordinating activities across law enforcement and U.S. intelligence agencies. He says Kevin Mallory's recruitment is just one of many efforts by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, to spy on the United States. What is MSS? So MSS is the principal intelligence agency of the Chinese government, and in rough terms, it is like the CIA and FBI put together. Their capabilities are world-class. They have cyber capabilities. They have expertise in turning people into cooperators. And they have all of the tools and expertise of a very capable intelligence organization. John Demers says Kevin Mallory hadn't worked for any U.S. intelligence agency

in five years, but he was still of interest to China. He spoke Mandarin, was desperate for money, and had classified information he might be willing to sell. You're looking for people who will be willing to work with you for one reason or another. You start very slowly. You start to see what information they're willing to share with you, originally innocuous information, then something maybe slightly more sensitive, and so forth. And that relationship develops over time.

It's a patient process. It's a grooming of an intelligence asset. It's a grooming and it's a constant testing to see what the person is willing to do. The Chinese didn't reach out to Kevin Mallory in a dark alley like in a movie. They made contact with him like any job recruiter would. They sent him a message on the career networking site LinkedIn. What could the Chinese tell from reading his LinkedIn page? When you look at this LinkedIn page, it's very clear immediately that he worked in national security, that he had the

type of background that the Chinese intelligence services are most interested in. He's good at national security, military, international relations, counterterrorism, security clearance, dispute resolution. This is a signpost to I was a former intelligence official. And it led to what you would expect. Mallory ended up in contact with this man, who called himself Michael Yang, and claimed to be an employee at a Chinese think tank. So he's a Chinese intelligence officer. We believe him to be a Chinese intelligence officer. And more importantly, Mr. Mallory, when meeting with him, believed him to be an intelligence officer. Over the next several weeks, Michael Yang paid Mallory $25,000 to come to Shanghai twice,

and Mallory reached out to former colleagues at the CIA, asking to be put in touch with people who had current intelligence on China. Prosecutors say his former colleagues grew suspicious and reported him to CIA security, putting him on the radar of law enforcement. When Mallory returned from his second trip to China, he was stopped by customs at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. He had lied on this form about how much money he was carrying, more than $16,000 in cash, and agents discovered this box with a phone in it.

Mallory claimed it was a gift for his wife, but it was actually a covert communication device that had been given to him by Chinese intelligence. This looks just like a regular phone. What makes it a covert communication device? So it's not so much the hardware. The phone itself had a unique piece of software installed on it designed to allow secure communication both in text and also

the secure transmission of documents later. You might think a former CIA officer would be cautious about the text he sends to a Chinese spy, but Kevin Mallory was remarkably direct, complaining about the money he was paid and the risk he was taking. Your object is to gain information, he told Michael Yang, and my object is to be paid for. I'll destroy all electronic records after you confirm receipt, Mallory wrote to Yang. I already destroyed the paper records. I cannot keep these around. Too dangerous. At this point, all the risk is on me. So he says, I'm taking all the risk.

But then he goes on a few bubbles later to actually try to transmit additional information to the Chinese. But technology wasn't Mallory's strong suit. He complained to Michael Yang that the phone wasn't working properly. This system sucks. It's too cumbersome, he wrote. I put all these messages and then and you can't read them because you're not logged in the same time. That's a poor system. At this point, prosecutors say Mallory was scared. He'd been stopped at customs and he feared the CIA and FBI were on to him. Prosecutors say he decided to come up with a cover story and reached out to the CIA,

telling them he thought he was being recruited by Chinese spies. The CIA called him in for an interview. My judgment is, and we haven't got through the conversation, that these guys work for Chinese intelligence. So my sense is that they were looking for government secrets, U.S. government secrets at some level. In this meeting, Mallory admitted the phone was a covert communication device given to him by the Chinese. But prosecutors say he lied about the classified documents he'd already sent. Did you send him anything on that phone?

I sent some tests of some sort just to see if I could do it right, and I couldn't figure it out. I messed that up. He's trying to control the narrative. So what you have here likely is an attempt to steer the story, to explain away some of the more alerting pieces while not admitting to the criminal activity of providing the classified information to the Foreign Intelligence Service.

We now know that at this point in time, Kevin Mallory has successfully sent the classified table of contents, the classified white paper, and tried to send several other documents unsuccessfully. Mallory offered to bring in the phone to be examined by the CIA, confident that all his messages to Michael Yang had automatically been deleted. So he believes everything he sent has disappeared from the device. So that's why he's willing to bring the device in.

We have every reason to believe that he believed at the time that those communications would be gone. Two weeks later, Mallory arrived at a hotel room in Ashburn, Virginia, for a second meeting with the CIA. When he got there, the FBI was waiting for him, along with a computer forensic examiner. He agreed to show them how the phone worked. When he goes to demonstrate it, up on the screen, where he expects to have his whole chat history basically deleted,

up on the screen comes some of the chat history. The FBI recorded the meeting. I'm the one who kept this much. So you may have commented you were surprised that there was this much there. Right, because in the past, maybe it's the screen size, because some of it just disappeared. One of the most incriminating messages that appeared on the phone was Mallory planning another trip to China. I can also come in the middle of June, he wrote. I can bring the remainder of the documents I have at that time. From the FBI perspective, this is a pivotal moment

in the investigation. Four weeks later, the FBI arrested Kevin Mall is a pivotal moment in the investigation. Four weeks later, the FBI arrested Kevin Mallory and searched his home. Hidden in the back of this closet in a junk drawer, agents discovered an SD card wrapped in tin foil on which he'd placed eight secret and top-secret documents, the same ones he scanned at that FedEx store in April. It is our belief that it was intentioned to take this SD card to China to provide to them. Does the Mallory case

fit a pattern that you're seeing coming from Chinese intelligence? Yes. We currently have three pending cases against former intelligence officers, and they're alleged to have been spying on behalf of the Chinese. It's hard to overstate how unusual it is to have three cases like this ongoing. It's not unusual. It's unprecedented. To me, it's disappointing, and it's really hurtful, I think, to everyone to know that we still have people who are willing to betray the U.S. for a few dollars. Bill Evanina is director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

He serves as the U.S. government's top counterintelligence official. When it comes to espionage against the United States, does China pose the greatest threat or Russia? When it comes to espionage, China poses the greatest threat, and it's not even close compared to Russia or Iran or any other country. And if you include economic espionage, industrial espionage, China poses the greatest threat, and it's not even close compared to Russia or Iran or any other country. And if you include economic espionage, industrial espionage, it's not even in the same ballgame. When most people think of espionage, they think of somebody in a trench coat trying to steal a state's secret. What's happening now with China, it's not just about state secrets, it's about technological

secrets. That's the prize that China wants. That's correct. It's trade secrets, proprietary data, intelligence, emerging technology, nanotechnology, hybrid, anything that they can see that is the future, supercomputing, encryption. Those are the issues that they look at. And they have a prioritized schedule that they look at. And they send people forward to go collect that data. John Demers of the Justice Department's National Security Division says since 2011, more than 90% of the economic espionage cases they've charged have involved China, which has stolen secrets about everything from genetically modified rice seeds to wind turbine technology. This is a persistent campaign you're seeing. Yes, very persistent, very sophisticated,

very well resourced, very patient, and very broad in scope. Demers says Chinese operatives have intensified their efforts on industries critical to Chinese President Xi Jinping's Made in China 2025 program, a 10-year plan to jump ahead of the United States in aerospace, automation, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge industries. I think some people who see this are going to think, well, this is something the U.S. must do as well. The U.S. intelligence community doesn't take trade secrets from foreign companies for the benefit of American companies. That doesn't happen. This is not something that we do. As for former CIA officer Kevin Mallory,

he continues to deny sending any classified information to the Chinese. Last June, a jury in Virginia found him guilty of conspiracy under the Espionage Act and lying to the FBI. In May, Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At age 45, Chris Downey had pretty much constructed the life he'd always wanted. An architect with a good job at a small housing firm outside San Francisco, he was happily married with a 10-year-old son. He was an assistant Little League coach, an avid cyclist, and then doctors discovered a tumor in his brain. He had surgery and the tumor was safely gone, but Downey was left completely blind. As we first reported in January, what he has done in the 10 years since losing his sight as a person and as an architect

can only be described as a different kind of vision. Several mornings a week as the sun rises over the Oakland estuary in California, an amateur rowing team works the water. It's hard to tell which one of them is blind, and Chris Downey thinks that's just fine. It's really exciting to be in a sport where nobody looks in the direction they're going. You're faced this way in the boat, and you're going that way. So, okay, even Steven. We were just talking about that whole exterior...

It's not exactly even Steven in this design meeting, where Downey is collaborating with sighted architects on a new hospital building. ...under the canopy where you can have down lights. But he hasn't let that stop him. Here you are in a profession that basically requires you to read designs and draw designs. You must have thought in your head, that is insurmountable. No. You never thought the word insurmountable.

Lots of people, friends that were architects, and anybody else would say, oh my God, it's the worst thing imaginable, to be an architect and to lose your sight. I can't imagine anything worse. But I quickly came to realize that the creative process is an intellectual process. It's how you think. So I just needed new tools. New tools? Downey found a printer that could emboss architectural drawings so that he could read and understand

through touch. They look like normal prints, normal drawings on the computer, but then they just come out in tactile form. So it is like Braille, isn't it? Right. And he came up with a way to sketch his ideas onto the plans using a simple children's toy, malleable wax sticks that he shapes to show his modifications to others. And he says something surprising started to happen.

He could no longer see buildings and spaces, but he began hearing them. The sounds, the textures, and the sound changes because there's a canopy overhead. You can sense that we're under a canopy? Yes. It's all a matter of how the sound works from there's a canopy overhead. You can sense that we're under a canopy? Yes. It's all a matter of how the sound works from the tip of the cane. I was fascinated walking through buildings that I knew sighted, but I was experiencing them in a different way. I was hearing the architecture. I was feeling the space. It sounds as if you began almost enjoying, in a way, being the blind architect.

Sort of this excitement of, I'm a kid again. I'm relearning so much of architecture. It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture. It was about what I had been missing in architecture. Is that sufficiently different? Oh, yeah. Chris Downey's upbeat attitude doesn't mean that he didn't go through one of the most frightening experiences imaginable and struggle.

He and his wife Rosa were living in this same home with their son Renzo, then 10, when Downey first noticed a problem while playing catch with Renzo. The ball kept coming in and out of sight. The cause turned out to be a tumor near his optic nerve. Surgery to remove it lasted nine and a half hours. He says his surgeon had told him there was a slight risk of total sight loss, but that he'd never had it happen. When he first came out of surgery, he was able to see.

But then things started to go wrong. The next day, half his field of vision disappeared. And then... The next time I woke up, it was all gone. It was just black. Complete and total darkness. No light, you can't see anything. No light. It's dark. It was just black. Complete and total darkness. No light, you can't see anything. No light. It's dark. It's all dark.

After days of frantic testing, a surgeon told him it was permanent, irreversible, and sent in a social worker. She said, oh, and I see from your chart you're an architect, so we can talk about career alternatives. Career alternatives? Yeah. Right away? I'd been told I was officially blind for 24 hours. And she's saying you can't be an architect anymore. And she was saying we could talk about career alternatives. I felt like these

walls were being built up around me, just like, yeah, you're getting boxed in. Alone that night in his room, Downey did some serious thinking about his son and about his own father, who had died from complications after surgery when Downey was seven years old. I could quickly appreciate the wonder, the joy of, I'm still here. It was actually joy? Yeah, it's like, I'm still here with my family. My son still has his dad. You know, your eyes are tearing up. You know that. Sorry. I always have a hard time talking through that. He knew that how he handled this would send a strong message to Renzo. I had been talking with him about the need to really apply himself. At the age of 10, it's that point where if you want something, you really have to work at it.

And here I am, facing this great challenge. So motivated to set an example, he headed back to work only one month later. This was the most healthy thing about Chris. Brian Bashan is executive director of the non-profit Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco and is blind himself. He waited a few days until the stitches were out of his skull and 30 days after brain surgery he's back in the office thinking okay there's got to be a way to figure this out and I'm going to figure it out. Bashan's organization, The Lighthouse, helps people new to vision loss learn how to figure things out. Let's try the first line.

When someone becomes blind, the odds are 99% they've never met another blind person. Is that right? Yeah, that really is true. Blind people need those role models. How to be blind, how to hold down a job. How to live an independent life. Specifically, how to work in the kitchen safely. How to navigate public transportation.

How to use screen reading software to listen to emails as quickly as the rest of us read them. Did you understand that? Yes. No. And most critically, how to get around in the world alone. Downey learned that at the lighthouse. When you first crossed a big street like this,

on your own, was it terrifying? It was absolutely terrifying. I can't imagine. I can totally imagine. I remember that day, stepping off the curb. You would have thought I was stepping into raging waters. Take the deep breaths and go for it. You've got to push through it.

Within a few months, he was traveling the streets on his own and getting back to normalcy with his son. The first Father's Day came up. Rosa was like, so, what do you want to do? You want to go on a picnic, go on a nice lunch? I want to play baseball with Renzo. And Renzo was like, he popped up. I could feel him jump to the edge of his chair. Baseball? You want to play baseball?

So Dad would throw to me, and I'd play like I was playing first base. How could he throw the ball to you? I'd just call out, I'm over here. Yeah, there you go. And he'd point, and I'd say, yeah, that's right, and then he'd throw it at me. But that's something I really loved about our relationship. He quickly was looking for possibilities.

He wasn't seeing you can't do that. He was like, well, why not? All right, here we go. Downey seems to have a knack for finding windows when doors slam shut. Just nine months after going blind, the recession hit, and he lost his job. But he got word that a nearby firm was designing a rehabilitation center for veterans with sight loss. They were eager to meet a blind architect. What are the chances? You had to believe that God's hand came down. It took my disability and turned it upside down. All of a sudden,

it defined unique, unusual value that virtually nobody else had to offer. Nobody. Yeah. Starting with that job, Downey developed a specialty, making spaces accessible to the blind. He helped design a new eye center at Duke University Hospital, consulted on a job for Microsoft, and signed on to help the visually impaired find their way in San Francisco's new and much delayed four block long Transbay Transit Center, which we visited during construction. If you're blind, you don't drive. You don't like it when we drive. So we're committed transit users.

So the question was, how on earth do you navigate this size of facility if you're blind? His solution? Grooves set into the concrete running the entire length of the platform. Now we'll just follow this, following those grooves. With a subtle change from smooth to textured concrete to signal where to turn to get to the escalators. Would you like to give it a try? Okay.

I know to go straight because of this line, and I feel... Oh, my. Oh, my. So it's pretty obvious. I can hear the difference from here. It's something sighted people may never notice, and that's precisely the point.

Downey believes in what's called universal design that accommodates people with disabilities but is just as appealing to people without them. It's the approach he used for his biggest project yet, consulting on the total renovation of a new three-story office space for his old training ground, the Lighthouse for the Blind. Coming into blindness need not be some dreary social service experience, but rather more like coming into an Apple store, thinking that there might be something

fun around the corner. One of Downey's ideas was to break through and link the three floors with an internal staircase that sighted people can see and the blind can hear. In blindness, it's so wonderful to be on the ninth floor and hear a burst of laughter up on the eleventh floor or to hear somebody playing the piano on the tenth floor. For the hallways, Downey chose polished concrete because of the acoustics. I can hear the special tap of somebody's cane or the click of a guide dog's toenails. Click of a guide dog's toenails? Yeah.

Well, is that good or bad? That's great. It's like you're seeing somebody coming down the hall. I know the sound of individual people who work here by the way they use their cane or the kind of walk they have. You can really distinguish between people by how they tap their cane. Absolutely. If you hadn't had Chris working on this building, a blind architect... It wouldn't have been as rich or so subtle, for sure. Spring 2018 marked the 10-year anniversary of Downey losing his sight.

So what did he do? He threw a party, a fundraiser for the lighthouse, where he's been student, architect, and now president of the board. Maybe a slightly bizarre thing, celebrating my 10-year blind birthday. But when you're 55 and you have a chance to be 10 again, you take it. I get the feeling that you actually think you're a better architect today. I'm absolutely convinced I'm a better architect today than I was excited. If you could see tomorrow, would you still want to be able to feel the design? If I were to get my sight back, it would be, I don't know. I would be afraid that I'd sort of lose

what I've really been working on. I don't really think about having my sight restored. There'd be some logistical liberation to it, but will it make my life better? I don't think so. We cannot explain what you are 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 violin. And when this story first aired two years ago, she was 12 years old. She's different from other prodigies we have 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 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 you remember the melody yes you want me to sing it 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. Two years ago, 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. A story of loss,

a story of redemption. 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. 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 I 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. I think this may be one of those titles. 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. So you improved the cadenza of Mozart. Well, yes. It's kind of a comment that goes by and everybody looks up and just goes, wow. Robert Yerdegan 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 led through California. Two years ago, 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 violin. But anyway, that's better than the piano teachers saying, you must choose the violin. Yeah 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 the 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 tree house. 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. piano plays applause This December, Alma will be performing a selection of her original compositions at Carnegie Hall. Alma composes from four notes pulled out of a hat. Go to 60minutesovertime.com. Sponsored by Eucrisa. Peace.