The art of diplomacy

THE TALLINN Festival in Tel Aviv celebrates the art, music and culture of Estonia.

By BARRY DAVIS
Talvet-Mustonen with her musician husband, Andres, who also performs at the annual Tallinn Festival. (photo credit: MAXIM REIDER)
Talvet-Mustonen with her musician husband, Andres, who also performs at the annual Tallinn Festival.
(photo credit: MAXIM REIDER)
Malle Talvet-Mustonen would like us all to chill out.
It’s not that the Estonian ambassador thinks we are hot-headed; her offer is of a purely meteorological nature.
“Estonia is green and cool, and even cold, so my slogan for Israel is, ‘Come and cool down in Estonia,” says Talvet-Mustonen with a chuckle. With the country’s warmest summer weather producing temperatures of only around 16º, and with an annual mean of just over 5º, it is not hard to get the ambassador’s point.
We met last week while the ambassador’s husband, internationally acclaimed conductor and violinist Andres Mustonen, was taking care of last-minute details in the run-up to the second annual MustonenFest Tel Aviv Tallinn Festival. The eclectic four-day program is being held at Hatahana in Tel Aviv from February 19-22.
“We are quite proud of our music, and this variety,” notes Talvet-Mustonen. “In fact, many people know about Estonia because of our music, and some of our composers, like [iconic composer] Arvo Pärt. He will turn 80 in September, and we have started celebrating that; he is a symbol the whole country looks up to.”
That says a lot about Estonia. Pärt is way beyond the mainstream pale, and could not be considered to have mass market appeal by any stretch of even the most bullish of marketing executives.
“His music is not designed for large audiences,” observes Talvet-Mustonen, “his music is not for large halls. It is intimate and meditative. But now he is very important to the world music scene, so everybody listens to him and becomes meditative, and they get some insight into themselves. So the music has a twoway influence.”
Pärt’s patriotism is, it seems, also a point in his favor. “He left the Soviet Union and lived in Germany for a while,” adds Talvet-Mustonen. “Then, when Estonia became independent again, he came back – and, of course, this adds to his glory.”
Estonia, like many of the former Soviet republics, regained its independence in 1991. Talvet-Mustonen was born a citizen of the USSR, so growing up, she had no experience of living in a democratic regime, and no firsthand reference points for considering the advantages of a freer society.
“As a child, you only take life as it is,” she says, though she adds that there were some cracks in the dictatorial veneer.
“Sometimes some sounds give you ideas.
My sound was, as a small child, waking up in the morning and hearing my father listening to the Voice of America [on the radio]. There were all these strange noises because the reception was blurred by the official Soviet devices.”
But wasn’t trying to tune in to forbidden radio stations a bit risky? “I wouldn’t say it was that dangerous.
This was in the beginning of the ’60s [post-Stalin] so it wasn’t so dangerous anymore, but it was not something that was encouraged. But people got to know the Voice of America and this other station, Free Europe, and those were things people listened to.”
The notion of liberty also fed off historic and émigré sources. “There were people of the older generation who remembered Estonia as a free country,” explains Talvet-Mustonen. “And those who could left after World War II and went to places like Sweden, and they kept in touch. So we had some idea of what it was like on the outside.”
That breath of politically fresher air, says the ambassador, was also enhanced by Estonia’s geographic position on the very western extremity of the Soviet Union. “We had Finland, which was only 65 km. away. Of course, we couldn’t travel there – but we could capture their TV programs. That’s how we got quite a lot of information.”
Naturally, things have changed in Estonia out of all recognition. Gone, for example, are the all-night lines outside the bakery, in hopes of getting hold of a decent crust of bread – although Talvet- Mustonen notes that having unrestricted access to consumer products, and better service standards, does not necessarily mean Estonians are entirely appreciative of their lot. “If people have to wait in line at the airport for passport control, they make faces and say ‘Why is it like this?’ They don’t remember that in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we had to wait in long lines to get on a boat back from Finland. It was two hours to get home by boat, and two hours waiting in line to get on the boat.”
All that seems a far cry not only from contemporary life in Estonia, but also from the ambassador’s spacious office on the 24th floor of a tower block across the road from the Azrieli geometrically shaped triad.
Talvet-Mustonen’s road to diplomatic service was preceded by some ambitions of a very different, artistic kind.
“I studied music, and when I finished my mid-level studies, my classmates continued with their music studies in the academy – but I realized I was, you know, not top 10,” she recalls.
Then DNA kicked in. “I want to study languages. My brother was already into it, and there was a tradition in my family to study languages.” Part of that was due to a burning desire to break through the Soviet information clampdown. “It was, again, about some way to communicate [with the outside world], by listening and reading [in other languages], even if you are not communicating directly.”
That was in the mid-’80s and, a few years later, political changes of seismic proportions began to evolve. Having studied English and French, and taught the latter, Talvet-Mustonen was wellplaced to make the most of the chance to spread her wings when the opportunity eventually arose. “A new government was put in place already in March 1990, so they were already preparing for something greater.”
The process was expedited by then-foreign minister Lennart Georg Meri, who subsequently became president in October 1992. “He was a very visionary man,” says the ambassador. “He began recruiting people around him who he knew could communicate in different languages, and he sent them out to the world.”
Meri considered Talvet-Mustonen’s Gallic grounding a boon for developing the new republic’s diplomatic ties.
“I was sent to Paris,” she recounts. “He told me, ‘You put up an information office for Estonia there.’” That must have been a dream come true for the young Estonian, freshly introduced to the joys of unfettered travel.
“It was something incredible,” says Talvet-Mustonen, adding that matters rapidly picked up pace in the French capital.
“Things moved quicker and quicker and, instead of an information center, I opened the embassy. That was in 1991; I was the chargé d’affaires. Later, I began to learn all about diplomacy but to begin with, it was a matter of jumping in the water. Of course, later it became more routine, and the exciting period ended.”
By then Talvet-Mustonen was a bona fide member of the diplomatic corps, and was entrusted with a string of prestigious berths – including postings to the UN facility in Geneva, and a stint back in Estonia addressing sensitive matters relating to weapons of mass destruction.
Her first full ambassadorial position was in Brussels, where her purview took in both Belgium and Luxembourg.
Talvet-Mustonen has been stationed in Tel Aviv for over two-and-a-half years, during which time she has done her utmost to promote Estonia culture here, and cultural interchanges between the two countries. The Tel Aviv Tallinn Festival is a prominent case in point. The four-dayer highlights Estonia’s traditional choral prowess, with the Estonian National Male Choir and Girls’ Choir Ellerhein in the lineup, as well as Mustonen’s own instrumental ensemble, Horticus Musicus, which he founded in 1972. A number of top Israeli artists also feature in the festival, including internationally acclaimed jazz pianist Anat Fort, who performed at the MustonenFest – also curated by the ambassador’s husband, having taken place in Tallinn earlier this month.
“Estonia is well-known for culture, so this is something we take and promote,” says the ambassador. “That needs some support from the state.” If the idea of a high of 16º in midsummer is enough to make the average Israeli green with envy, the level of state funding for the arts in Estonia is more than enough to make any Israeli artist or arts center director weep into his or her espresso. “The first thing in the preamble to our constitution says is the republic is set up for that, to safeguard and keep alive Estonian language and culture. So there is quite a lot of state support for theater, music and so on.”
There is a cast-iron funding mechanism in place, which keeps the cultural wheels turning unimpeded in Estonia and across the world. “We have a very particular system, which is cultural endowment,” explains Talvet-Mustonen. “It gives grants to people who apply and are approved by a committee, and it is open to everybody. There are several branches according to fields, like literature, translation, music, theater, performances and also traditional folk culture.”
It gets better. “This cultural endowment is independent of the state budget,” she continues. “It is not the government which decides who gets the endowment; the income comes from the excise tax on alcohol and cigarettes.” One person’s poison is the artist’s gain.
While the ambassador is keen to push the Estonian cultural boat out there, she says that artistic endeavor cannot plow ahead willy-nilly. “In the arts everything is now so complicated, with all the dilemmas of freedom of expression, and then you have political correctness. You can call it other things, like hurting other people’s feelings.
“Sometimes, with your very bold art, you can harm other people; I don’t like hurting people. And then we can come back to what happened in Paris [at the terror attack at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices].”
Talvet-Mustonen and I met a few days before The Jerusalem Post reported on the “My Poland: On Recalling and Forgetting” installation currently exhibited at the Tartu Art Museum in Tartu, Estonia. The work references the Holocaust in a disrespectful way, and was fiercely criticized by Estonian Jewish community head Alla Jakobson.
At the time of that interview, Talvet-Mustonen was already aware of the controversial exhibit. In an email exchange after, the ambassador wrote that she was disturbed by the exhibit, as a diplomat, as the head of the Estonian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance alliance and also personally.
“I felt very awkward: we had just had in Estonia solemn commemoration events around the Holocaust memorial day,” she wrote in an email to the Post. The events included a seminar for teachers, special programs at history museums and in Tel Aviv, organized events that included a performance of the opera Wallenberg. She added that the exhibition was a “bad surprise... that the Estonian Jewish community deemed insulting.”
Talvet-Mustonen is stalwart in her belief that freedom of expression is one of the basic rights of a democratic society. “Nobody should be intimidated, attacked, let alone killed because of artistic convictions, works of art and free expression. This is very clear. What happened in Paris – and now in Copenhagen – is more than horrifying and blamable.”
However, she laments the complexity of the issue. “At the same time, and this is what I was referring to when we met – in connection with the art exhibition that caused protests – there are also other values that should keep our societies together: respect, empathy and dialogue. I agree with our minister of culture, who said that ‘The commemoration of the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity should not be the basis for offensive interpretations.’” The ambassador says her two-and-a-half-years here have whizzed by, and that she is kept on her toes by the brisk clip of events in Israel, and by the Israeli mind-set. “I have very little time to think about things, because what I feel here is that there are bits of information coming at me all the time. I don’t really have time to digest it all, and even to form my own opinion about it. All the Israelis are just full of stories, and full of thoughts and ideas and opinions. I have to try to understand it and be part of it.”
That sounds a bit dizzying, but Talvet-Mustonen appears to be up for it. “It is so interesting here,” she says.