The Homeless Wanderer

Yewubdar Gebru was born in Addis Ababa in 1923 into a wealthy family and sent at six to a boarding school in Switzerland, where she studied piano and violin; she and her sister were among the first Ethiopian girls educated abroad. During the Italian invasion her family were taken as prisoners of war to the island of Asinara and later near Naples, and three relatives were killed. Back home she played for Emperor Haile Selassie, but officials at court refused to let her leave to study at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1944 she became a nun, spent a decade in a hilltop monastery, and took the name Tsege Mariam. She later left the convent to compose for piano, violin and organ, and with the emperor's help her first record was released in Germany, where she raised money for homeless children. "The Homeless Wanderer" is the piece most often cited for how she blended two worlds: the rubato of nineteenth-century European romantic piano alongside Ethiopian pentatonic modes. Listeners have compared her to everyone from Chopin and Satie to Professor Longhair. After the 1974 coup she stopped releasing music, and after her mother's death in 1984 she left Ethiopia for the Kidane Mehret church in Jerusalem, where she lived quietly for the rest of her life. The 2006 Éthiopiques volume devoted to her brought her to a new audience, and "The Homeless Wanderer" has since turned up in films from Porto to the trailer for Netflix's Passing. She died in 2023, aged 99, and a piano of hers was played at her funeral.