This Ethiopian sister developed into one of the world’s most distinctive pianists and composers. Three piano songs accompany you on your way to St Catharinadal. The Homeless Wanderer is a composition about a wanderer who, lonely and far from home, manages to turn fear into friendship. The Song of Abayi is about homesickness. The piano playing speaks even without knowing the occasion. A tingling twinkle emanates from it. It is at times soothing, introspective with a hint of melancholy, and at other times cheerful like water flowing from streams. Although Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru was classically trained, she sucked in all kinds of influences. Passages bring to mind birdsong, jazz, minimal music such as by Erik Satie, and choral singing from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Her piano playing seems to be a way of communicating with God.

This remarkable woman’s (1923-2023) from-socialite-to-monastic life journey is worth a film adaptation. She studied as a child at a posh Swiss boarding school, was a singer at the court of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, became a prisoner of war and three of her brothers were murdered by the Italian aggressor. She also lived as an ascetic: for ten years she did not play the piano, lived without running water and electricity, and slept on a bed of dried mud. After her mother’s death in 1984, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru fled the communist Derg regime and ended up in the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem. This is where she would spend the rest of her life.

‘Emahoy’ is a title for monials (female monks) in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, similar to “sister”. The chosen name “Tsege Mariam” means Flower (or Plant) of Mary. ‘Gebru’ is the paternal family name. Like many people, including the (original) residents of Holy Triangle monasteries, she was a migrant. She donated the income from her albums and concerts to the church, orphanages and people displaced by the war in her motherland or elsewhere.

Emahoy’s legacy is the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, an independent non-profit organisation that supports music education programmes in the US and Ethiopia: www.emahoymusicfoundation.org