‘We Should Know Who We Are’: Veljo Tormis in Conversation

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I am much saddened by the news of the death of Veljo Tormis on Saturday, 21 January. Tormis was as significant a figure in the forging of Estonia’s cultural identity as Sibelius was in Finland’s. His music is instantly identifiable and physically engaging: it has an energising power – and there is an astonishing amount of it: he was a very busy man. He also had a wonderfully warm personality, modest in manner but deeply engaging, and I was proud to call him a friend. I published an interview with him in Tempo (New Series, No. 211, January 2000, pp. 24–27), and reproduce it here, more or less as it appeared then, footnotes and all, rather than attempt to update it. I had no idea at the time that I would be launching Toccata Classics a few years later, much less that Veljo would feature on the label as a recording artist, but he plays the shaman drum on the Svanholm Singers’ recording of his Raua needmine (‘A Curse upon Iron’), his best-known work, on TOCC0073. I salute his memory.

Veljo Tormis, who will be 70 on 7 August 2000, has become – de facto rather than through any external sign of age – the Grand Old Man of Estonian music¹. Although he will celebrate the event in an Estonia enjoying its tenth year of liberty, for the three preceding decades, though most of the dark night of Russian occupation, Tormis’ music, based on regilaul, the primitive runic folksong of the Estonian people, was an important repository of ethnic identity.

Tormis in London

Tormis was born at Kuusalu, some 30 miles due east of Tallinn. He first studied organ in August Topman’s class in the Tallinn Conservatory in 1942–44, graduating from the Tallinn Music School as an organist (under Salme Krull) in 1947. Still at the Tallinn Music School he then studied as a choral conductor under Jüri Variste, before taking composition lessons from Villem Kapp in 1950–51². After his composition studies with Kapp, Tormis moved to Moscow, where he studied with Shostakovich’s friend Vissarion Shebalin (1902–63), graduating in 1956. From 1955 to 1960 Tormis himself taught music theory and composition in Tallinn Music School and has been active as a freelance composer since 1969.

His output is vast, its backbone formed by some 250 choral pieces, some of them free-standing songs but others cycles of considerable scope. Like many composers in the former Soviet Union Tormis turned his hand to film music, writing some three dozen scores; and there is also a handful of orchestral and instrumental works in his catalogue, early works all of them,³ since when he has composed almost exclusively for chorus.

In the Estonia Concert Hall in Tallinn I asked Tormis, an affable and easy-going man with a ready laugh, when his involvement with choral music began.

Since childhood I have been living in choral music: my father was a choir conductor and organist in a little village.

And was folk music, too, a prominent part of his childhood?

It was mostly church music, not folk music, and it was not connected directly with folk music. I had my first connections with folk music through Estonian composers, not directly: Mart Saar⁴, Cyrillus Kreek⁵, etc., etc.

Did he begin his own researches from that point onwards?

It was as a student in the Conservatoire that I became acquainted with folk music. Edgar Arro⁶ sent me to the countryside, museums, and so on; we have very rich archives.⁷

So it was a joy in the ethnomusicology discoveries he made there that sparked an ambition to compose?

No, first I wanted to be an organist and then later a choir-master. But then in ’48 the organ class was closed on ideological grounds; it was Stalin. Then I had to choose another profession! What could I do in my situation? Then I tried choral conducting, but that didn’t work: there weren’t any churches. Then my choir professor said: ‘It’s not for you – choose another profession”. So composition was the third possibility!’

Harry Olt’s invaluable guide Estonian Music offers a useful thumbnail guide to the constituent elements of Tormis’ style: ‘Imitation, parallel chords in gradual, step by step motion, rhythmic variations with respect to the rhythm of the text, and monotonous repetitions around certain motifs’.⁸ How did the runo-song primitivism that makes Tormis’ music so distinctive evolve?

I didn’t just discover it one day; I was a long way on the approach to it. It was ten years after I was at the Moscow Conservatory, after I had written orchestral pieces and an opera⁹, that I discovered the real value of this regilaul. Then I tried to bring the structure of regilaul into my own compositions. My first big work was Estonian Calendar Songs.¹⁰

Tormis with drum (Photo: Triinu Ojamaa)

Tormis’ studies of the folksong tradition on which he has drawn ever since drew him to the conclusion that

old Estonian folk songs are an intact part of an ancient culture where all the components are combined in structure: the melody, the words, the performance, etc. It also became clear that it is a very old pre-Christian culture which is shamanistic in substance, and extremely close to nature in the ecological sense.¹¹

But his attraction to Estonia’s distant past is no mere nostalgia:

Self-apprehension and self-cognition is vital for maintaining balance and viability. We should know who we are and where our roots lie. Then it is easier to set up goals for the future.¹²

One obvious characteristic of Tormis’ music, apart from the rhythmic punch of its relentless ostinati, is its harmonic astringency. As a result, it looks deceptively bald on the page: the sense of growing excitement that immediately hits the ear isn’t always obvious to the score-reading eye.

I often build works over a pedal point. Our solo songs don’t lend themselves to harmonisation, as it used to be done in Romantic music. Our classical composers also use these melodies – very short, in three, four stages. You can’t harmonise them, so I was looking for other possibilities: parallel chords, clusters.…

For Estonia under the Soviet yolk, as for the other two Baltic countries, Latvia and Lithuania, song was a vital expression of national identity. The Soviet authorities tolerated, and tamed, the Üldlaulupidu, or United Song Festivals, that have been held in Tallinn every five years since 1869, attracting some third of the entire population of Estonia as performers (30,000) or listeners (300,000).¹³ One imagines that Tormis’ explicitly nationalist compositions must have generated political difficulties for him.

Yes, during the days of Stalin, of course, and they were forbidden in the ’60s and ’70s, these works. It’s complicated, and paradoxical. In 1948, when they were shouting about formalism, they said, ‘Please look for folksongs’ – but it was a very good slogan for me! In the ’60s and ’70s the Ministry of Culture here said, ah, that’s nationalism. It took them thirty years to understand what I was doing! I was not a fighter, not a dissident¹⁴ – but our public understood what I wanted to say in my national, folk-based work.

The ability to communicate through art is a constant in discussions with musicians who lived through the Soviet oppression. The best-known practitioner of such virtuous double-speak is Shostakovich, of course; and the Czech composer and organist Petr Eben told me in interview how he used music to reach to his audience past the censors:¹⁵

art could sometimes say things that otherwise couldn’t be told. For the same reasons that things didn’t get into the newspapers, people would like to go to the small theatres rather than the National Theatre because there things were said that couldn’t be pronounced elsewhere. People became accustomed to reading between the lines. In literature and painting it was quite difficult because the censors understood if there was something against the government. But music was abstract and it was not so easy to survey. So if I quoted a Gregorian motif, the people from the churches would know it and enjoy it; they would know that this was a spiritual work – but the Union of Composers would have no idea! In this way composing for me was a sort of message for the people.

Tormis laughs at the bitter-sweet memories this account invokes:

We had a joke here that you must sing in Latin. Some songs you had to sing in Latin, in order that our Communists would not understand: they knew only Russian. Some songs were translated into Latin to protect the songs, though their original language was Estonian. Now, of course, it’s good because you can sing it all over the world and everybody knows the Latin language. All the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, is translated into Latin – it was special done as a present for the Pope in Rome. A pagan epic in Latin – that’s something! Latin is a very good language to translate the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg.¹⁶ The old Greek and Latin epics are in quantitative verse, and we have quantitative verse in regilaul as well.

This talk of epics raises another question: now that Tormis is free from political constraints to compose whatever he wants, does he have plans for any lager-scale works? Wagner, after all, contemplated crowning his career with a symphony, and Bruckner was toying with the idea of an opera.

These forms are not for me. I have written a big stage work: that was Estonian Ballads, a cantata-ballet.¹⁷ The libretto was written by my wife [Lea]. Everything in it is from folksongs.

One of Tormis’ biggest works is Forgotten Peoples, a cycle of six further cycles based on songs by ethnic groups who, as the title suggests, were already dying out or were dead as living cultures when in 1970 Tormis began the twenty-year task of its composition: the Livonians from the Gulf of Livonia (renamed the Gulf of Riga by the Communists, long after the Livonians had been subsumed by Latvian culture); Votians, Izhorians and Ingermanland Finns (Igrians) from the coastal areas between Tallinn and Leningrad; the Vepses, east of Lake Ladoga; and the Karelians in the part of Finland north of Leningrad that was captured by the Soviet Union during the Second World War, though there were pockets of Karelians as far south as Tver¹⁸. Is Tormis’ music now all that is left of these ancient peoples?

The Vepses are still alive, and so are the Karelians. But the Livonians, Votians…

His voice trails away, and then revives as he recalls contemporary moves to preserve this heritage before it slips away entirely:

But there is in Latvia a folk ensemble that is half-Latvian, half-Livonian. And we have these Finno-Ugric days here, when all the Finno-Ugric peoples come, and they sing the same melodies as I have used in the first piece in Livonian Heritage:
Tšitšor-linkist, tšitšor-linkist,
ni um aaiga ilzô nuuzô,
tšitšor, tšitšor’.¹⁹

Photo: Triinu Ojamaa

This common heritage of Finnish and Estonian folk literature has allowed Tormis also to treat material that may be more familiar from Finnish sources: ‘Undarmoi and Kalevoi’, for example, the tenth song in Tormis’ Izhorian Epic, relates the same tale of slaughter and revenge as Aulis Sallinen’s opera Kullervo (1986–88), though in in two-and-a-half hours’ less time. Tormis laughs.

That may be, yes. For example, I’ve written for the Hilliard Ensemble a piece called [in English] Kullervo’s Message²⁰ and a piece for the King’s Singers on Finnish historical material.

Tormis’ mention of these two British vocal groups suggests that, now as his fame spreads and his music is at last becoming familiar to audiences outside the Baltic republics, he must be getting commissions from far further afield.

Yes, but I have very little energy.

He taps his chest: he had a heart attack six years ago. So he is taking things easy?

We are living in a house in the country, outside Tallinn. Tallinn is a very difficult town, psychologically.

Didn’t the lifting of the Soviet yoke nonetheless bring a surge of adrenalin to music-making in Estonia?

The first period was very difficult. We had lost all our western public and had very little contact with the west. But they have come now: Warner and Fazer Edition, ECM too. We had before a window through Finland – and our window to Europe was Finnish TV!

Fazer Edition, indeed, has become Tormis’ main publisher and they are slowly catching up with his enormous output. For Tormis himself it is a mixed blessing:

I am busy correcting proofs for Fazer, all the time. I am working as an editor!²¹

I am obliged to Sirje Normet for help with translation during this interview.