TalkingUnfazed by the dreary weather, a sizable audience of onlookers cheered as the voices of over 21,000 choir members resounded in the rain in Estonia.
Despite the rain, the Song Festival Grounds, a huge open space in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, was crowded on Saturday night. Tens of thousands of artists and spectators, many dressed in national costumes, attended the traditional Song and Dance Celebration, which decades ago sparked opposition to Soviet domination and was later acknowledged by the U.N. cultural agency.
Held about every five years, the four-day choir-singing-dancing event revolves around Estonian folk music and patriotic hymns. The 19th century is when the custom began. It sparked the rebellious Singing Revolution in the late 1980s, which assisted Estonia and other Baltic countries in escaping Soviet hegemony.
For a nation of roughly 1.3 million people, it continues to be a significant source of pride.
This year, weeks in advance, tickets for the major event, a seven-hour concert on Sunday with choirs of all ages, were sold out.
Rasmus Puur, the artistic director’s assistant and a conductor at the song festival, attributes the surge in popularity to Estonians’ desire for unification following the world’s unrest, particularly the Russian war in Ukraine.
We want to feel like we belong to Estonia and that we are one today, more than six years ago when the event was previously conducted. On Friday, Puur told The Associated Press.
Soviet takeover
Large-scale song-only festivals followed by song and dance festivals have been held since Estonia was a part of the Russian Empire.
In 1869, the southern city of Tartu hosted the first song celebration. According to Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, an associate professor at the University of Tartu, it signaled a time of national awakening for Estonians, during which the Estonian-language press, theater, and other things began to develop.
During Estonia’s independent period between the two world wars and the nearly 50 years of Soviet captivity, the festivities persisted.
“In a sense, it was very logical for the Soviet regime to tap into this tradition and try to co-opt it,” Seljamaa said in an interview, referring to the Soviet rulers’ interest in mass spectacles of all types.
During that period, Estonians were forced to perform Soviet propaganda songs in Russian, but they could also sing their own songs in their own tongue, which served as a form of therapy and defiance, she said.
According to Seljamaa, the intricate planning required to organize such a large gathering taught Estonians how to organize, so when the political landscape shifted in the 1980s, the protest against Soviet control naturally took the form of gathering and singing.
The oneness went beyond the boundaries of Estonia. Two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania banded together to form a 600-kilometer (370-mile) human chain during the Singing Revolution in protest of Soviet domination of the Baltics.
The folk music festival in Estonia and comparable events in Latvia and Lithuania were acknowledged by the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, in 2003 for exhibiting the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
We performed a free song.
Marina Nurming remembers going to the Singing Revolution events as a teenager in the 1980s. As a longtime interest, she traveled from Luxembourg, where she currently resides, to Tallinn this year to participate in the Song and Dance Celebration as a choir vocalist.
We sang ourselves free during the Singing Revolution, she told AP.
According to Seljamaa, the song and dance celebration has since recovered from a decline in popularity in the 1990s, which was a challenging period for Estonia as it was gaining independence following the fall of the Soviet Union.
She claims that young people are very interested in it, that there are always more artists eager to participate than the space can accommodate, and that some people who left Estonia to live overseas return to participate.
One example is nurturing. She sings with the European Choir of Estonians, a singing ensemble that brings together Estonians from over a dozen nations.
Lots of chances to sing
This year’s four-day event began Thursday and featured a folk music instrument concert as well as many stadium dance performances by more than 10,000 dancers from across the nation.
All of the participants—singers, dancers, and musicians—wear traditional costumes and wave Estonian flags as they march from the city center to the Song Festival Grounds by the Baltic Sea, which culminates over the weekend with a song festival that features about 32,000 choir singers.
In addition to collectives from outside, participants come from all throughout Estonia. Participants range in age from six to ninety-three, and there is a mix of men, women, and children.
Most people sing and dance as a hobby in addition to their day jobs or schoolwork. However, collectives had to endure months of preparations and a stringent selection process in order to participate in the event.
Karl Keskla, an electrical engineer from the western Estonian island of Saaremaa, has previously attended the song celebration as a spectator, but this is his first time participating as a singer.
I had the impression that what they did was truly unique, and that practically everyone you meet has been or participated in it at least once. At the march on Saturday, 30-year-old Kesk la told the AP, “I just wanted that feeling too.”
elevated emotional state
This year’s song festival topic is dialects and regional languages, and the repertoire includes a blend of folk tunes, popular national anthems that are customarily sung during these festivities, and brand-new songs composed especially for the event.
The audience won’t be familiar with all the songs, particularly those sung in dialects, but there will be plenty of chances to join in, according to Heli J. Rgenson, the festival’s artistic director.
The patriotic hymn “My Fatherland is My Love,” which Estonians spontaneously chanted at the 1960 festival in protest of the Soviet authorities, will conclude Sunday’s main event. This anthem, which both singers and viewers consider as the event’s pinnacle of emotion, has been played at the end of every song celebration since 1965.
“This is a very special moment,” said a tearful Jergenson, who will lead a combined choir of over 19,000 people singing it this year.
She thinks the same things that motivated the custom over 150 years ago also motivate it now.
“The need for singing, songs, and people has remained the same despite many historical twists and different turning points,” she remarked. There are some songs we wish to sing and we sing all the time. This is what has sustained this custom for more than 150 years.
“We put our problems aside.”
The celebrations, according to the participants, are a significant aspect of their sense of national identity.
over songs and dances, Estonians usually manage to get over difficult times. Singer Piret Jakobson stated, “If it’s difficult, we sing together and that brings everything back together and then we forget our troubles.”
Engineer Taavi Pentma, who participated in the dancing performances, said it’s great that all Estonians are doing the same thing. Thus, our hearts are beating (as one) and we are breathing in unison.
This year, almost 100 members of the European Choir of Estonians traveled from all over Europe to attend the Song Celebration. Kaja Kriis, who has been residing in Germany for the past 25 years, is one of them.
“Estonia is my home,” she remarked, adding that it’s crucial for her to remain with her friends, preserve my Estonian language, and uphold Estonian culture.
