TALLINN, ESTONIA — Ozmar Huerta grew up in his choir family hearing a mesmerizing story: far away in Estonia, a tiny country near Finland with a population the size of Hawaii, people sang to achieve freedom. Today they still rally around singing every five years. The Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir had gone three times.
“It was the choral tour, something magic,” said the 14-year-old Richmond resident.
On July 4-7 this year, Huerta got to be part of the Laulupidu story, and the magic was bigger than anything he could have dreamed of. As his voice merged with a choir of 35,000 to sing “My Fatherland is My Love,” Estonia’s unofficial national anthem, under the baton of one conductor July 7, the crowd began to sway along with the singers, people held hands, and the blue and black colors of the Estonian flag unfurled.
“It felt like everybody was just one voice,” he said. “Here we were, singing with tens of thousands of people, all singing for the same reason — for happiness, for joy. I was so overwhelmed with joy and happiness.”
Huerta helped carry an almost uninterrupted tradition dating back more than 150 years, testifying once again to the power of song as Estonia’s main unifying force. Born in 1869 out of resistance to Russian cultural domination, Laulupidu helped Estonia win its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union, becoming what social scientist Maju Lauristin called a “collective ritual that strengthens and recreates the national identity.” In 1988, she joined some 250,000 Estonians in rebelliously singing the country’s banned national anthem, stirring a peaceful “Singing Revolution” that helped end 50 years of communism in her country.
Friendship with Estonian singers: Laulupidu is a “holy moment among us,” said Aarne Saluveer, head of the famous Estonian Television Girls’ Choirs, whose singers hosted the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. A famous rock band player during the Soviet era, he always found ways to hide meanings in his songs to avoid being a puppet of the Soviet Union, he said. Laulupidu “is a place where all generations meet, where singers tell a story for the next generations.”
Twenty years ago at London’s Heathrow International Airport, Saluveer stumbled upon the award-winning Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, which, according to its website (piedmontchoirs.org) has offered music and choral training to hundreds of boys and girls since 1982 from schools throughout the Bay Area, particularly from Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, San Francisco and Marin counties. The American and Estonian choirs were returning home from international competitions they’d won and had time to kill. They began singing.
Saluveer encouraged then-Piedmont East Bay choir artistic director Robert Geary to audition for the selective big Estonian choral event. They made it in 2004, 2009 and 2014. This year again, the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir was among 25 foreign choirs at Laulupidu.
With the help of Estonian native Saimi Kint, a retired Bay Area chemical engineer whose family had fled the Soviet army in 1944, the young Bay Area singers learned 14 songs in Estonian and the meanings behind the lyrics. That required tremendous dedication. The reward? To participate in Estonia’s “own very personal and inspiring renewal,” Geary said.
“No other event has illuminated, educated, and reinforced the highest human values for my singers and for me,” said Geary, who retired from leading the choir this month.
Singing in Estonia is “an expression of an entire country’s identity,” Geary said. “To be in touch with that, to observe that it does have real power in many ways, not just to make you feel good but to unify, to preserve a people’s identity — that’s unique.”
Intrinsically linked with Estonian identity, culture and language that successive waves of occupation tried but failed to extinguish, Laulupidu is something “we cannot translate because we feel it,” said Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, who sang at Laulupidu. “But 10 percent of the nation is here — 30,000 people singing, close to 100,000 watching, and we are 1.3 million — and that gives an understanding of what Laulupidu means to us.”
While elsewhere populist nationalism has tended to divide, “for a small nation, being proud to be Estonian is not the same as being nationalist,” Kaljulaid said. Showing the crowd of singers, half of whom were born after the Singing Revolution, she added: “For us being Estonians is this.”
National pride and unity: “This” — a joyous, peaceful, inclusive demonstration of pride and unity — is what Huerta and 51 other Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir singers ages 12 to 16 were a part of. The festival started with 1,200 choirs paraded from Tallinn’s old town to the singing grounds along the Baltic Sea. Dressed in vivid embroidered traditional costumes of their villages, the singers formed one gigantic blaze of color and national pride cheered on as though they were national celebrities in the opening parade of the Olympics.
“It is a bit surreal really,” Kai Kowal, 14, of Oakland, said during cheers of “Welcome to Estonia!” “Even though I’m not Estonian it feels like I’m invited by everybody.”
Next to him was Taavi Koppel, 16, who’d come from the small town of Otepää after spending years rehearsing with his choir to make it to the competitive Laulupidu event. “We’re small, but we feel big,” he said.
It took seven hours for the 35,000 singers to complete the 3 miles to Tallinn’s “Singing Ground,” the giant shell-shaped stage along the Baltic Sea built in Soviet times that is now considered a shrine to Estonian nationhood. In a choral marathon July 6-7 they sang “classics,” songs that were banned but nevertheless sung in the darkest hours of communism, along with new songs.
After Kannel, a song written for this year’s Laulupidu, the crowd of singers erupted into wild applause. Conductor Rasmus Puur, at 28 a rising star of Estonia’s music world, was the center of attention. The cheering intensified when the composer ran up to the conductor’s podium and the two hugged.
That’s when something hit Kowal: In Estonia, the national heroes were not sports figures or rock stars but the composers, conductors and lyricists who have helped the country to peacefully preserve its language, culture and independence.
Changed lives: Camden Louie was 13 when she went to Laulupidu for the first time, 15 years ago. “To be around this music, its history, the tradition of peaceful protest, the story behind the Singing Revolution changed my life,” said Louie, now a software trainer in Palo Alto who came back to chaperone the group.
Abigail Sanchez, of Berkeley, said the Estonians’ “unconditional love for their country” overwhelmed her. “To just look out at the sea of people and choir members striving for absolute unison within one people was beautiful,” said the 16-year-old. She said it was “humbling” to play a small part in helping this amazing, talented group show their pride, their love for their country.”
For the Bay Area singers the emotional highlight came July 7 as their voices blended in the giant choir for “My Fatherland is My Love.” They said they could feel the revolutionary power of song. When poet Lydia Koidula wrote it in the 19th century Estonia was still part of Tsarist Russia, and German was its official language. Set to music for the first national gathering — the first Laulupidu — it inspired a yearning for freedom that led to Estonia’s independence in 1918.
Independence was short-lived: After a pact some 20 years later between Hitler and Stalin, Estonia changed hands between German and Soviet rule. Ultimately, the Soviet army “liberated” Estonia from German to Soviet occupation. Estonians defiantly sang in the late 1980s and early 1990s to overthrow Soviet rule.
At half Saluveer’s age the young Rasmus Puur never lived under Soviet rule, but Laulupidu today means “keeping the continuity of our culture that lasted many thousands of years,” he said. ”It’s important: In an uncertain world, it’s a very real, very stable thing — something the children can trust, hang on to.”
As darkness began to emerge, tens of thousands of mobile phones lit up, and the stars in the night sky gleamed, Ozmar felt that big, peaceful connection. With his voice he was connected, not just with Estonians but with something bigger.
