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Boston Globe

Thousands of voices unite in song at traditional choir festival celebrating Estonia's culture

The four-day To this day, it remains a major point of national pride for a country of about 1.3 million. Advertisement This year, tickets to the main event — a seven-hour concert on Sunday featuring choirs of all ages — sold out weeks in advance. Rasmus Puur, a conductor at the song festival and assistant to the artistic director, ascribes the spike in popularity to Estonians longing for a sense of unity in the wake of the global turmoil, especially Russia's 'We want to feel as one today more than six years ago [when the celebration was last held], and we want to feel that we are part of Estonia,' Puur told the Associated Press on Friday. Advertisement The theme of the song festival this year is dialects and regional languages, and the repertoire is a mix of folk songs, well-known patriotic anthems that are traditionally sung at these celebrations, and new pieces written specifically for the occasion. The main concert on Sunday night culminated with a song called 'My Fatherland is My Love' — a patriotic song Estonians spontaneously sang at the 1960 festival in protest against the Soviet regime. This anthem has been the closing song of song celebrations since 1965, and many described it as the highest emotional point of the event. This year, a choir of over 19,000 singers performed it, with the spectators singing along and waving Estonian flags. The festival's artistic director, Heli Jürgenson, believes that what drove the tradition more than 150 years ago still drives it today. 'There have been different turning points, there have been a lot of historical twists, but the need for singing, songs, and people have remained the same,' she said. 'There are certain songs that we always sing, that we want to sing. This is what keeps this tradition going for over 150 years.' The tradition to hold massive first song-only, then song and dance festivals dates back to the time when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire. The first song celebration was held in 1869 in the southern city of Tartu. It heralded a period of national awakening for Estonians, when Estonian-language press, theater, and other things emerged, says Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, associate professor at the University of Tartu. The festivals continued throughout a period of Estonia's independence between the two world wars and then during the nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation. Advertisement The Soviet rulers were into 'mass spectacles of all kinds, so in a way it was very logical for the Soviet regime to tap into this tradition and to try to co-opt it,' Seljamaa said in an interview. Estonians had to sing Soviet propaganda songs in Russian during that time, but they were also able to sing their own songs in their own language, which was both an act of defiance and an act of therapy for them, she said. At the same time, the complicated logistics of putting together a mass event like that taught Estonians to organize, Seljamaa said, so when the political climate changed in the 1980s, the protest against the Soviet rule naturally came in the form of coming together and singing. In 2003, the United Nations' cultural body, This year's four-day celebration, which started on Thursday, included several stadium dancing performances by over 10,000 dancers from all around the country and a folk music instrument concert. It culminated over the weekend with the song festival featuring some 32,000 choir singers. That was preceded by a large procession, in which all participants — singers, dancers, musicians, clad in traditional costumes and waving Estonian flags — marched from the city center to the Song Festival Grounds by the Baltic Sea. For most, singing and dancing is a hobby on top of their day jobs or studies. But to take part in the celebration, collectives had to go through a rigorous selection process, and months worth of rehearsals. Advertisement Participants described the celebrations as being an important part of their national identity. 'Estonians are always getting through the hard times through songs, through songs and dances. If it's hard, we sing together and that brings everything back together and then we forget our troubles,' singer Piret Jakobson said.