On 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley interviews 12-year-old musical prodigy Alma Deutscher. The English-born girl is a composer, pianist and violinist. She composed her first piano sonata at age six. She completed her first opera The Sweeper of Dreams at age seven. Alma’s latest opera is Cinderella. It’s based on the fairy tale but music itself is the central theme of the story. The evil stepmother has inherited an opera company from Cinderella’s late father. The prince is a poet, who’s not searching for a woman to fit into a slipper but for a lost melody for his poem.
The video below features Cinderella’s Ballad in Act 1 (performed in Vienna, Austria), “Wenn hernieder sinkt das Dunkel” (translated “When the day falls into darkness”). It captures the moment when Cinderella sees the true colors of her stepmother and realizes she’s all alone in the world. Later in the production, when Cinderella flees from the ball, she sings the end of this aria to the prince. According to the YouTube description, “The prince is haunted by the melody, and especially by the painful harmony on the word ‘Dunkel’ (‘darkness’). Alma Deutscher‘s Cinderella opera will make its debut in the United States on December 16, 2017 at the Opera San Jose. 60 Minutes will air on Sunday, November 5 at 7:30pm.
