Alma Elizabeth Deutscher (born on February 19, 2005) is a British composer, pianist and violinist. A child prodigy, Deutscher composed her first piano sonata at the age of five. At seven, she completed the short opera, The Sweeper of Dreams. At age nine, she wrote a violin concerto. At the age of ten, she wrote her first full-length opera, Cinderella, which had its European premiere in Vienna in 2016 under the patronage of conductor Zubin Mehta, and its U.S. premiere a year later. Deutscher’s piano concerto was premiered when she was 12.
Once she explained that some people have told her that she should not compose beautiful melodies in the twenty-first century, because music must reflect the complexity and ugliness of the modern world. “But I think that these people just got a little bit confused. If the world is so ugly, then what’s the point of making it even uglier with ugly music?” and she continues: “if you want to hear how ugly the modern world is… you can just switch on television and listen to the news… there is enough ugliness in the world, I want to write beautiful music, music that makes the world a better place.”
This is a beautiful definition of art. Real art is something that makes the world more beautiful and so we could say that the Gospel is the best artistic composition, since the purpose of the Gospel is none other than to make this world a better world. There is no better way than the Gospel to make this world better.
Therefore, in a certain way, all Christians are artists, since when we Christians preach or spread the Gospel we are making the world a better place, and we are fighting not against that wrong conception of art but rather against that wrong conception of life that makes the world an uglier place.
We Christians are called to be poets and to transform this world with the Divine Art. We must allow the Divine Master to inspire in us His Divine Poetry in order to transform this world with that Divine Poetry. It is not a matter of having skill, like Alma Deutscher but rather it is a matter of being docile to the Divine Master. We all can become artists if we are docile to the Divine Master, if we spread His Divine Poetry, rather than our ugly human ideas.
Yes, as Alma says in that message which I quoted above, there is enough ugliness in this world because people do not follow the Divine Inspirations but rather, they follow their fallen human inclinations. We Christians should show them how to be docile to the Divine Inspirations and how to make Divine Poetry. If we live according to the Gospel, we are performing Divine Poetry with our lives.
