![]() ![]() She shows off a chocolate tray, decorated with tissue and paper: a butterfly feeding table. I don't think any adult is ever going to go, 'Damn, I didn't do my GCSEs aged nine'." So Karina goes to a local nursery and spends much of her time "junk modelling". ![]() "What every parent wants for their children is to give them a happy, balanced, enjoyable childhood. Stories of home-schooled geeks scare her. She does not know from where her linguistic precocity comes: Charlotte was adept at science, she says, and Karina's father, Nick (from whom Charlotte is separated), was good at physics and maths. Shown a picture of a glove that was lacking one finger and asked what was missing, she said the other glove.Ĭharlotte found it "reassuring" to discover that Karina was not suffering from some "really weird way of thinking". Shown a picture of a teapot without a handle and asked what was missing, she said the picnic mat. "Karina has an unusual air of maturity in one so young," said Professor Joan Freeman and, in a careful report pointing out the shortcomings of IQ tests in very young people, suggested that she had an IQ of 160 – said to be the same as Stephen Hawking's – which placed her in the top 0.03% of children of her age.Īsked in these tests what we do with our eyes, Karina said we put contact lenses in them. But after a helper at the church creche noticed Karina's "incredible" imagination, Charlotte found a child psychologist on the internet and, a year ago, took her daughter to London for an IQ test. "Everybody she came into contact with would say, my goodness, how old is she?"Ĭharlotte thinks it is "a bit rotten" to compare Karina with friends' children "because they all develop in their own way and you don't want to be this competitive mum". "As soon as she started talking, it was like this massive word explosion," Charlotte says. They live, the two of them, with Truffles the cat, in Surrey. Now he's come back to play with his friends." I'll give him some special horse medicine," she says. Karina places Sandy in a bed she has made from Fuzzy Felt. Except for Sandy, that is, a small plastic creature with a wounded leg. I can never, ever, ever remember."All of my horses are called Athena," announces Karina. But I can't remember the whole improvisation, though. "I can write it down in my notebook, maybe, for when I'm writing a piece. "I can't remember everything that I did in this improvisation," Alma says. She adds an Alberti bass - a kind of repeated broken chord - in her left hand, and her right hand takes off, playing what sounds to be a fully formed piece, composed in the time it took to read this blog.īut then, just as quickly as the notes came to her, they're gone. "'It's difficult to teach her because one always has the sense she'd been there before.'" Alma Deutscherīack at the keyboard, Alma plays the four notes again. "You know, her piano teacher once said, 'It's a bit difficult with Alma,'" Guy Deutscher tells Pelley. Both of them are amateur musicians, but neither understands the mystery of their daughter's genius. She teaches Old English literature, and he is a noted linguist. "But then, actually sitting down and developing the melodies, that's the really difficult part-having to tell a real story with the music."Īlma's parents, Guy and Janie, are professors. "Sometimes when I get the melodies, I hear them just sung, or I hear a melody for orchestra," she says. But the melodies, she says, are the easy part. They come as she walks, as she plays, as she sleeps. "I think that it makes much more sense if he falls in love with her because she composed this amazing melody to his poem," Alma explains, "because he thinks that she's his soulmate, because he understands her."Īlma is used to melodies popping into her head. When Cinderella finds a poem the prince wrote, she's inspired to set it to music and sing it to the prince at the ball. Rather, Alma's reimagined character is a composer, and the prince, a poet. In December 2017, the Opera San Jose Orchestra staged her opera Cinderella in her American debut.īut it's not the Cinderella of fairytale. Two years ago, "60 Minutes" was there as she prepared her violin concerto and piano concerto at the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Alma DeutscherĪlma, who is British, has already performed her compositions around the world. "I just think about it for a few minutes," she tells Pelley, who patiently observes. ![]()
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