Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou

A pianist in Jerusalem

Yewubdar Gebru, later known by her religious name Tsegué-Maryam, was born on December 12, 1923 in Addis Ababa; Emahoy is the honorific for a nun. She died on March 26, 2023 in West Jerusalem, aged 99. In 1929 she was sent to a boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, studying piano and violin, among the first Ethiopian girls educated overseas, and in 1933 she returned to Ethiopia. After the war she studied with the Polish-Jewish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz in Cairo and worked as the first female secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1944 she became a nun and lived at a hilltop monastery for about ten years; she told Kate Molleson in 2017 that she took off her shoes and went barefoot for ten years. The Fader says she became a nun at 19 after being refused permission to study music in London.

She recorded two charity albums in Cologne in 1963, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen (500 copies) and Der Sang des Meeres (50 copies), according to JazzTimes, though Wikipedia dates official release to 1967 with Haile Selassie's help; the date is contested. The Hymn of Jerusalem / The Jordan River Song followed in 1970 and Yet My King Is from Old (Church of Kidane Mehret) in 1972, self-released. During the Derg period from 1974 she released no music, and in 1984 she left Ethiopia and settled at the Kidane Mehret Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. She made home cassette recordings in Addis Ababa between 1977 and 1985, issued as Souvenirs in 2024, which The Quietus's Jakub Knera called a document of exile and war made by a virtuoso, mesmerising pianist.

Ethiopiques Vol. 21: Ethiopia Song (Buda Musique, 2006), compiled by Francis Falceto, gave her international exposure; Buda describes solo piano pieces by a Christian nun in a Jerusalem monastery, steeped in Ethiopian culture. The music blends church music with Western genres such as blues and ragtime, European Romantic piano and Ethiopian scales, and the Wikipedia article credits her with over 150 compositions. She performed rarely, once in a rare public concert at the Jewish Community Center in Washington on July 12, 2008, and in 2013 three Jerusalem tribute concerts marked her 90th birthday. Mississippi Records reissued her work from 2016, including the compilation, Jerusalem (2022) and Church of Kidane Mehret (2025). Her music appears in the films Time (2020), Passing and C'mon C'mon (2021), and the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Honky Tonk Nun (2017, Kate Molleson) renewed attention. She founded a music foundation to fund children's music education.