The best way to visit a new, virtually unknown country is with a sympathetic and knowledgeable guide. For Estonia, my guide was Arvo Volmer, the Estonian who conducted several Australian orchestras but at the time of writing was Chief Conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. He took me on a tour of the capital, Tallinn on the Baltic. One place was musically significant: it’s a vast amphitheatre, in a park out along the waterfront. Here are held the National Song Festivals, so important in Estonian history since the mid-19th century that Estonia had what has been called a ‘singing revolution’.
Australia’s knowledge of Estonia has come largely through music and singing. In 1998 the leading Estonian conductor, Neeme Järvi, directed the Melbourne Symphony in Rudolph Tobias’s oratorio Jonah’s Mission (1909), the first significant Estonian work in its genre. The following year, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
But what do we Australians know of Estonia, and its music? When I was growing up, Estonia was tagged as one of the ‘captive nations’, part of the empire of the Soviet Union. Their liberation was advocated especially by our most anti-communist politicians, abetted by some of the Estonians who had made Australia their second home. Devotees of the music of our time know the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who moved from an avant-garde modernism to a new simplicity of almost medieval spirituality. But how many people think of Pärt as an Estonian? And perhaps some wondered at the emergence from such a small country of the most-recorded conductor of the 1980s and 90s, Neeme Järvi.
Something vital and intriguing is clearly happening in that part of the world. In Perth in 2001, after a West Australian Symphony Orchestra concert, a Lithuanian cellist, David Geringas, and an Estonian conductor, Arvo Volmer, were joking that they had just combined their talents to show, in their performance of Pēteris Vasks’ gloomy but impressive Cello Concerto, how miserable life must be in the country of its composer, Latvia! Three recently ‘captive’, now ‘liberated’ countries, whose history can be understood together. Where are they?
Locating the Baltic countries
The easiest way to reach Estonia is to take the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, a fast crossing of the eastern reaches of the Baltic Sea, southwards. Of the three countries, Estonia is the closest to Russia, Lithuania the furthest. The railway link from Tallinn to St Petersburg, established in 1871, was important in the Russification of Estonia and the nationalist reaction against it which led to Estonia’s brief first period of independence, from 1918 to 1940. In 1940 Estonia came under full Soviet occupation and became a republic of the USSR. But in July 1941 the Germans occupied the country until 1944, when the Soviets drove them out and re-established their dominance which was to last until 1991. These vicissitudes of Estonia, a small but strategically located country of 1.5 million people, repeated experiences going back deep into its history.
History is still very visible in Tallinn, one of the best-preserved of the Hanseatic Ports on the Baltic, which still has the 18 towers of its medieval battlements and many old buildings. Here you can still see the quarters of the merchant guilds in the lower streets, which in the Middle Ages were even closer to the sea than today. Surmounting them, on the hill Toompea, are the fine 18th century buildings which replaced the castles of the Teutonic Knights, one of which now houses the parliament of Estonia.
For centuries this was a German-dominated city, its prosperity based on trade and exploitation of the Estonian-speaking hinterland, first forested and, as the centuries went on, increasingly devoted to rural agriculture. German was the dominant language in the major cities like Tallinn, and the Lutheran reformation made what became Estonia a mainly Protestant region from the 16th century. Great power rivalry had been sweeping to and fro over the region for centuries – the Teutonic Knights were defeated in 1242 by the Russian Alexander Nevsky in the battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, on the eastern Estonian border, celebrated in Eisenstein’s film with Prokofiev’s music named after Nevsky. The Swedes and the Poles established dominance in the 16th and 17th centuries, but the Baltic German nobility were the victors until Peter I of Russia, in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) brought Estonia into the Russian Empire for more than 200 years. The German-speaking elite maintained its cultural dominance. Lutheran pietism encouraged choral singing.
Emerging Estonian consciousness
In spite of attempts at Russification and conversion to Orthodoxy, an Estonian national consciousness emerged in the last period of Russian rule, partly stimulated by the reforms of Tsar Alexander II, including the emancipation of the serfs, in the 1860s. The reading also promoted by Lutheranism encouraged a literature in the Estonian language, including the epic Kalevipoeg (Son of Kalev), published in an Estonian-German edition in 1857-61. The Estonian language is part of the Finno-Ugric group, related to Finnish but not to much else. Its 14 cases, double infinitives, lack of gender, of articles and of a future tense, make it difficult to learn!
The first Song Festival with 800 male choral singers was held in Estonia’s second major city, Tartu, in 1869. This was part of a national and Romantically-inspired movement in literature, music and social thought, which also promoted schooling in the Estonian language and the collection of folksongs. The Vanemuine movement, named after the mythical god of song Estonia shares with Finland, symbolised this awakening. By 1894 the all-Estonian Song Festival had 50,000 in the audience. Far from acceding to Russification, aware Estonians were being liberated from their Baltic German cultural world. Celebration in song affirmed the existence of an Estonian nation, and World War I provided the opportunity for this to become a political reality. In the wake of the Russian Revolution the German invasion of February 1918 drove the Bolsheviks out of Estonia, and the threat of German occupation galvanised Estonian thinking towards independence, which became possible with the defeat of Germany later in the year. A British naval presence off the coast near Tallinn, and voluntary Finnish assistance, prevented a Russian re-occupation.
During the post-World War II Soviet dominance, the inter-war period of Estonian independence was remembered as a golden age of national awakening and the creation of a modern and independent Estonian culture. Politically the era falls into two periods, one of liberal democracy (1920-1934), then, under the growing threats of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, a time of ‘guided democracy’, or moderate authoritarianism. This time saw the major achievement of modern Estonian literature, Truth and Justice (1926-1933) by A.H. Tammsaare, and the fantastic and grotesque graphics Eduard Wiralt produced in his Paris studio between 1928 and 1935.
The Tallinn Concert Hall and Theatre, built side by side in 1913, were a cultural focus (destroyed in the Soviet air raid of 1944, but since rebuilt). The first operas using only native Estonian talent were performed immediately after World War I, and higher schools for music were founded in Tallinn and Tartu.
Symphonic writing
Music, as well as continuing the tradition of the Song Festivals (climaxing in the last years of Estonian independence in the 1938 festival in Tallinn, with 17,500 participants and 100,000 in the audience), saw the emergence of significant symphonic writing, particularly from Heino Eller (1887-1970) and above all his pupil Eduard Tubin (1905-1982), whose 11 symphonies and other works are recognised internationally as Estonia’s major contribution to music. Tubin was forced by the Soviet reoccupation in 1944 to flee to Sweden, where he spent the rest of his life and composed the greater part of his music.
In retrospect Tubin appears as the first of a succession of important Estonian composers, who came to maturity in the post-war period. Veljo Tormis and Eino Tamberg, both born in 1930, are very different – Tormis’s mainly choral-based oeuvre returns to ancient modes of runic chanting, whereas Tamberg’s lucid style enjoys pleasant sound combinations for their own sake. A slightly younger composer of symphonic music is Lepo Sumera (1950-2000), who became minister of culture (1988-1992), and who visited Australia for performances of his music in the 1980s. Arvo Pärt (born 1935) emigrated to the West in 1980 and has become the best-known internationally of Estonian composers; of a more recent generation is Erkki-Sven Tüür (born 1959), whose Cello Concerto was performed by David Geringas with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Arvo Volmer in 2001.
We come full circle to my guide to Estonia, Arvo Volmer. Going to Estonia to meet him on home turf was a bonus, but stay-at-homes have in him a reliable musical guide to a country whose music is interesting and attractive out of all proportion to its size and weight in the affairs of the world.
First published in programs associated with performances by the Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras