7-year-old 'Mozart' girl composes her own opera

Alma Deutscher is not only an accomplished composer, she is also a skilled violinist and pianist and her first major composition has been highly commended by the English National Opera.

Deutscher started composing by the time she was five and wrote a sonata at the age six followed by her opera, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

Videos of her work have been viewed more than 300,000 times since her father shared them on YouTube - and her abilities have led to comparisons with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who by five had mastered the keyboard and violin and started composing.

Alma wrote her own opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, this year.

"The music comes to me when I'm relaxing. I go and sit down on a seat or lie down. I like thinking about fairies a lot, and princesses, and beautiful dresses," Alma said.

She added that her best compositions are created when she is on the swing in the garden at her home, but she keeps a tape recorder by her bed for when inspiration strikes.

The idea for The Sweeper of Dreams - which narrowly missed out on a place in the final of an English National Opera contest for adult composers - came in a dream.

"Mozart composed this piece in my dream and when I got up, I sat down and played it and my father recorded it," she said.

Alma's father Guy Deutscher, an Israeli-born linguist and amateur flautist, said he realised his daughter had a connection with music when she was a baby.

She was given her first violin for her third birthday and in less than a year she was playing Handel sonatas.

Deutscher and his wife Janie, who was an organ scholar at Oxford, moved with Alma and her four-year-old sister Helen from Oxford to Surrey so that they could be closer to the specialist Yehudi Menuhin School in Cobham, where Alma has weekly piano and violin lessons.

Alma, meanwhile, is working on a cello sonata that she was commissioned to write after performing one of her compositions in Italy.