[1] From an early age she studied piano with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer.

With Buhlig's help, Sultan fled Germany in 1941 via Lisbon, from where she emigrated to the United States by ship.

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 Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations; her concert programs included music from Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Franz Schubert to Igor Stravinsky, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman.

Grete Sultan gave her last recital in 1996, aged 90, at New York's Merkin Concert Hall, performing Bach's Goldberg Variations.