Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, composer and pianist, has died at the age of 99.
According to the country’s state-run news outlet Fana Broadcasting Corporate, she died in Jerusalem. Guèbrou had been living at the Ethiopian Monastery there for almost 40 years.
As a child, she spent time as a prisoner of war and went onto study under the Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz in Cairo.
Guèbrou released her first album in 1967, donating proceeds to those in need, and continued to use money made from her music to help raise aid for Ethiopian children orphaned by war. The Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation was also established to help children in need have the ability to study music.
After her mother’s death in 1984, she moved to the Ethiopian Monastery in Jerusalem.
Her music has been used in the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary Time and in Rebecca Hall’s Netflix drama Passing. Over her life, she composed more than 150 original works of music 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 determined by religious self-exile, maverick gender struggles and Ethiopia’s dramatic 20th-century political history – and who became a singular artist in the process”.
She once said to Molleson: “We can’t always choose what life brings. But we can choose how to respond.”
