The 94-year-old Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou continues to play the piano and amaze her audience. Like when she performed at the court of the Ethiopian Emperor HaileSelassie decades ago. Her hands still run fast on the keyboard, as when she was performing before the Emperor. From her small room in the Orthodox Christian monastery of Jerusalem come out notes that mix classical and Ethiopian music. A mix that has given her a worldwide success.

The daughter of a wealthy Addis Ababa family, Eamhoy is the first Ethiopian girl sent to study in Switzerland. Once in college, she chose music, for which she showed enormous talent. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia during World War II interrupted her studies. She moved to Egypt and continued her music lessons with a famous Polish musicologist, Alexander Kontorowicz. “In Cairo, she recalls, I played nine hours a day. There I met all the classical repertoire.”

After the war, when Kontorowicz was named director of the Emperor’s honor guard musical band, he invited Eamhoy to perform in front of Emperor HaileSelassie who became fascinated by her.

Eamhoy was offered a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but refused. “Despite the prestige and honor of playing for the emperor, I felt I was missing something.” She made a surprising choice to he leave performing in concerts and entered became a nun. Between prayer sessions and other duties as a nun, she devoted herself to the study of sacred music and Ethio-jazz. Thus she began to compose melodies that blend different styles.

When the Derg came to power, he was forced her to flee again. In 1984, she entered the Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem where he discovered Israeli musician Maya Dunietz who, in 2006, convinced her to record for the prestigious “Éthiopiques” series. The fame arrives with glowing reviews in the international press. “I wrote a lot of music in the isolation of my cell,” she says. She released another album, which also became a success.

– Tesfaye Gebremariam