Grete Sultan

Who was Grete Sultan?

Grete Sultan was a German-American pianist.

Born in Berlin into a musical family, she studied piano from an early age with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer. In 1933, after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, she was, as all Jews were, banned from playing in public and could only appear in concerts of the "Jüdischer Kulturbund".

With Buhlig's help, Sultan fled Germany in 1941 via Lisbon, from where she emigrated to the United States by ship. She settled in New York City and took up piano teaching, first at Vassar College and the 92nd Street Y, then at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. In the mid-1940s she met the composer John Cage and became good friends with him, and it was through Sultan that Cage met one of her students, Christian Wolff, who gave Cage his first copy of the I Ching—a book that shaped Cage's composition methods during the subsequent decades.

Cage dedicated two pieces to Sultan. The first was part of his Music for Piano series, Music for Piano 53–68. In 1974, when Sultan was in the process of learning Cage's Music of Changes, the composer offered to write some new music for her, and the result was a monumental piano cycle, Etudes Australes. Sultan made the premiere recording of the work and played it in concerts worldwide. She also performed the music of Alan Hovhaness and Tui St. George Tucker, but contemporary composers were not the only ones that interested her: in the 1940s she helped popularize Bach's Goldberg Variations, and her concert programs included music from Beethoven, Chopin, and Schubert to Stravinsky, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman.