Estonia’s Chorus of Protest Changes Tune : Culture: Singing helped its people through decades of subjugation. Newfound independence has also liberated the century-old tradition.

From the stage of a vast amphitheater, the limpid sound of four-part harmony drifted out to a meadow paved with listeners and dotted with blue-black-and-white flags: “I can’t keep quiet/I want to sing/I cannot help it that my country is so dear to me. . . .”

This post-independence Sunday, like every important occasion for more than a century, was marked here by a uniquely Estonian cultural event--an outbreak of choral singing.

Estonia is a nation of choristers. It seems an odd skill to be developed in a land of just over 1 million people, but there is scarcely an Estonian child who at some time or other has not been a member of a choir; leaders of the most important national groups regularly visit schools across the country seeking to pick the best voices for their world-famous ensembles.

“It is through song that we have felt ourselves to be a nation,” said Venno Laul (his surname itself means “song”), the director of the national choir and the Estonia Music Conservatory. “It’s particularly true of Estonia that song follows us in our grief and our joy and our political strife.”

Choral singing played a key role in the Estonian cultural awakening of the late 1800s, when a series of quinquennial national song festivals began. (The 125th anniversary of the first will be celebrated in 1994.) And it has been key to the political resurgence experienced in the last three years, climaxing in independence this month.

In 1988, the quest for independence opened with a rally of 300,000 people at Tallinn’s Song Festival Grounds. The gathering was so remarkable that the ensuing period is known here as the “Singing Revolution.” What people tend to remember most about that festival is that it was the first at which Estonia’s unofficial national anthem, “My Fatherland Is My Love,” banned for years, was sung as the official finale.

The song festival tradition began in one of Estonia’s darkest periods, the famine year of 1869. There were 845 singers and 10,000 in the audience. Very few Estonian songs had been written, so most of the program was drawn from German music. But the event is today viewed as “a powerful stimulus to the development of Estonian national consciousness and musical culture,” in the words of historian Toivo U. Raun. Simultaneously, the country experienced an explosion of literary and artistic creativity.

For the next 30 years to the end of the century, while Estonia weathered a period of Russification imposed by its powerful eastern neighbor, the song festivals every five years were landmarks of nationalism. In the period of Soviet domination, when the programs were almost exclusively Estonian-written songs, the average number of singers was an astonishing 3,000.

“It is safe to say,” Raun wrote, “that no other Estonian cultural tradition of the past century and a quarter has proved as powerful or as durable.”

Or as subversive. Stalin, who subjugated Estonia in 1940, was quite taken with the choral festivals in their role as expressions of mass culture. He commissioned Estonian composers to write socialist realist songs extolling Lenin and Soviet communism. At the same time, he banned some indigenous favorites, including one evoking the Estonian flag.

“There were always these compulsory songs,” remembered Eve Tarm, an Estonian journalist who grew up during that time, “but the audience just ignored them and the choruses did them as their payment just to be allowed to sing. And even then, there were always songs on the program that spoke to the soul.”

Tiia Loitme, director of the National Children’s Chorus, was more blunt as she stepped off the podium after conducting her 70-member girls’ ensemble under a chilly drizzle.

“We loved to sing sly songs,” those whose meaning was comprehensible only to Estonian listeners, she said. “The others”--the Soviets--”would just hear the sound and think it was only music.”

A tiny woman with short reddish hair, clutching a nosegay of purple flowers, she smiled impishly. “It was a war without guns.”

If so, the battlefield was a meadow on the edge of downtown Tallinn that today boasts what must be one of the largest choral amphitheaters in the world, a soaring wood and steel shell that can accommodate more than 25,000 singers.

Schubertian melodies melded with the broad harmonies of Brahms chorales, the songs are emotionally devastating in their purity, coming across with the simplicity of lullabies. In the amphitheater on Sunday the effect was like hearing a great pipe organ of human voice.

The audience filled the meadow nearly up to its fringe of trees, occasionally swaying to the music, arms linked. At this time, as at many such events in the past, the singing undermined the normal Nordic reserve of the Estonians. People in the meadow, overcome by hearing the song of love for their country carrying, for the first time in 50 years, with no burden of secrecy or subversion, mouthed the words silently and let tears flow from their eyes.

Taking a respite between numbers, Laul pondered a question about whether the improving political security of Estonia would rob the songs of their pertinence and deprive the tradition of its importance.

“These songs of our imprisonment will retain their place in our repertoire,” he said, “but their meaning will change.” He used a handkerchief to dry his brimming eyes. “At least for the time being, we’ll have enough people who still want to sing.”