Latvia is alive with song again

Every five years Latvia stages a week-long song and dance festival and this year my wife’s Latvian cousins got us tickets to two of the biggest events. I had no idea what to expect. The first evening, in a vast open-air arena in the Mezaparks forest outside Riga, while the light faded behind the tall pines, we watched a 10,000-strong choir dressed in varied costumes – the men in cream or grey flared frock coats and black boots, the women in flower crowns, tartan shawls and striped skirts – as they sang traditional songs. The next day in the Daugava stadium we thrilled to an astonishing 17,000 amateur dancers swirling in intricate and flawless formations to bagpipes, folk and jazz. My cousins-in-law, some of whom took part, explained that rehearsals take the full five years and about 2 per cent of the country’s entire population performs. Here is patriotism of a benign and peaceful kind, a love of tradition and a sense of ease that we seem to have almost lost in Britain: no boasting, preaching, apologising or straining at modern reinterpretation. It left me affectionate for this small, often beleaguered nation.

It was song that triggered Latvia’s, Estonia’s and Lithuania’s liberation from Soviet occupation when, on 23 August 1989, an unbroken chain of two million singing citizens joined hands from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius, after which the communist regimes collapsed. I first visited Riga three years later and found green shoots of fragile hope germinating through the cracks in a nation still hosting a sullen chunk of the Red Army. Sitting on a bench on the banks of the Daugava river, my mother-in-law, who escaped to Sweden in 1944, sang a song with a school friend she had not seen since then. The friend then pulled out a photograph of their class and went through the faces one by one.