Tallinn Song Festival Grounds

This guide to the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds turns on a summer night in 1969, when Estonia's choirs finished their Soviet-approved program on this curved stage and simply refused to leave. You'll hear how they broke into a patriotic song banned for two decades, without a conductor's signal or an orchestra beneath it, and how Soviet officers responded by ordering a military brass band onto the grounds to drown them out. Stand facing the arched roof overhead, raised just a decade earlier, while you picture the crowd that would not stop singing.