150 Years of the Estonian Song Festival

Three singing children at the centre, surrounded by musical notes on staves that echo off the walls of the song stage (Laululava) in Tallinn. Below, a scarf with traditional folk patterns and the commemoration inscription "LAULUPIDU 150"; above the design, the country name "EESTI" and the year of issue "2019".

The Estonian Song Festival, Laulupidu in Estonian, is regarded as one of the world's most significant choral music festivals and has been recognised, together with its Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts, as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2003. The tradition dates back to 1869, when the first all-Estonian song festival took place in Tartu — at a time when Estonia was under Russian tsarist rule and an independent national consciousness was only just beginning to take shape. The festival brought together a folk-music movement closely linked to the national revival known as the Estonian National Awakening. Choirs from every part of the country came together, creating a collective experience that transcended linguistic and regional boundaries.

This significance never diminished in the following decades — quite the opposite: during the Soviet occupation, it became one of the few legal spaces for Estonian identity. The so-called Singing Revolution of the late 1980s, in which mass choirs sang patriotic songs and thereby peacefully helped pave the way to Estonia's renewed independence, is unthinkable without this festival tradition. Today, the Laulupidu is held every five years in Tallinn; the singers' stage at the Lauluväljak festival grounds accommodates tens of thousands of performers and hundreds of thousands of spectators. Estonia honoured the 150th anniversary of this first song festival with its own 2-euro commemorative coin in 2019.