When she was just four years old and couldn’t read music, Idil Biret played Mozart and Bach’s preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavichord by ear, from hearing them on the radio. On July 7, 1948, the Turkish Parliament voted Idil’s Law: after having heard the child prodigy play, the President of the Republic, Ismet Inonü, decided that from then on, the most-gifted Turkish children would be allowed to go study abroad. Idil was seven years old. Wilhelm Kempff, Cortot and Nadia Boulanger would be her future teachers.
A strange destiny for this envied and admired – but also sometimes violently criticized and yet so little know – woman. Today, some two million of her records – more than Glenn Gould – have been sold around the world. A woman of unbridled culture and curiosity, with an unthinkably powerful and flawless memory, her concerts are unforgettable. Shamanism, Christianity, Islam and Sufism coexist within Idil Biret’s culturel melting pot. Western literature and art are constant sources for her thoughts and musicality.
Biret plays everything, absolutely everything. Her memory is like a vast attic, where not only composers, but their different interpreters’ styles have accumulated over the years. When she was eleven years old, she played Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos with Wilhelm Kempff in front of an audience of two thousand four hundred people at the Paris Theâtre des Champs-Elysées. Between 1960 and 1980, an endless stream of concerts took her to the USA, Australia, Russia, Europe and Turkey. Her repertory, which she knows by heart, includes contemporary music of course, as well as over 100 concertos, transcriptions of Franz Liszt and Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninov’s complete works for piano. In New York, she recorded a series of works by twentieth-century composers: Berg, Bartok, Boulez, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Webern. She has also completed a boxed set of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas and five concertos, as well as transcriptions of the nine symphonies. In addition, Idil Biret has played for the most prestigious of twentieth-century conductors, including Pierre Monteux, Hermann Scherschen, Wiilhelm Furtwängler, and Hans Knappertsbuch.

This book was started in the fall of 2002. Besides the formal interviews that contributed to it, the author, Dominique Xardel, was able to ask Idil Biret questions that she answered off the cuff.  Nothing suits her personality less than hesitation, ambiguousness or misunderstandings. So readers will constantly be astounded by the wealth and precision of her replies. Music in all shapes and styles is in every breath Idil Biret takes; it is her principal nourishment. Convinced that it is pointless to work at anything but outdoing herself, she pursues her quest, and will continue to do so for many years more, as the musical adventurer she truly is.