Music
The musician, who spent the last almost 40 years of her life in a monastery in Jerusalem, has died
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, composer and pianist, has died aged 99.
The extraordinary life of the 93-year-old singing nun from Ethiopia
She died in Jerusalem, according to the country’s state-run Fana Broadcasting Corporate news agency. Guèbrou lived there for almost 40 years in the Ethiopian monastery.
As a child she was a prisoner of war and studied with the Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz in Cairo.
Guèbrou released her first album in 1967, donated the proceeds to those in need and continued to use the money from her music to raise aid for Ethiopian children orphaned by the war. The Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation was also established to give needy children the opportunity to learn music.
After the death of her mother in 1984, she moved to the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem.
Her music was used in the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary Time and Rebecca Hall’s Netflix drama Passing. During her life she composed more than 150 original works for piano, organ, opera and chamber ensembles.
Journalist and author Kate Molleson made a documentary about her for BBC Radio Four called The Honky Tonk Man. She described her as “a woman whose choices were shaped by religious self-exile, unconventional gender struggles and the dramatic political history of 20th-century Ethiopia – and who became a unique artist in the process”.
She once told Molleson, “We don’t always get to choose what life brings. But we can choose how we react.”
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