Sultan, Grete

Grete Sultan ( born Grete Sultan , full name Johann Margarete , German Johanna Margarete ; June 21, 1906 , Berlin - June 26, 2005 , New York ) is a German-American pianist.

In her childhood, she studied with Richard Bulig , an American pianist of German origin who came to Germany; then she studied at the Berlin Higher School of Music with Leonid Kreutzer , and also took private lessons from Edwin Fischer . Before the establishment of the Nazi regime, she performed in Germany and Switzerland. In the 1930s, due to her Jewish origin, she could speak only at the evenings of the Jewish Cultural Union, then these performances ceased. In 1941 , the Sultan managed to escape from Germany and travel to the United States through Lisbon . For many decades, she taught in New York, combining teaching with concert.

The most significant creative community connected the Sultan with John Cage , whom she met in 1945. Grete Sultan, in particular, Cage owed his acquaintance with Christian Wolfe , who studied with her as a pianist and was sent by her to Cage to practice the composition: it was Wolfe who introduced Cage with the book " I Ching ", which largely determined the further creative evolution of Cage. In 1974 , having learned that the Sultan was going to perform Cage's composition “The Music of Changes”, which included various hits on the instrument, Cage (according to his own admission in an interview with Richard Kostelyants ) decided that “an elderly lady should not beat the piano”, and Sultan suggested writing for her another, new work ^[1] . Such an essay - a large-scale cycle of 32 pieces, created by a complex algorithm using I Ching and the atlas of the starry sky of the Southern Hemisphere - was created by Cage in 1974 - 1975 . and received the name "Etudes of the Southern Hemisphere" ( Études Australes ); The Sultan performed it a lot in different countries and carried out the first complete recording of the cycle.

The Sultan's repertoire included a wide range of other works, from the “ Goldberg Variations ” by Johann Sebastian Bach (the Sultan performed them at his last public appearance at the age of 90) to the works of Morton Feldman .