28 SEPTEMBER 1994

Watching the TV-series Estonia on Swedish TV, a chamber play about the investigation in the years after the accident. It is interspersed with sequences from the disaster.

Subdued, calm, and utterly unbearable.
852 people, all perishing in such a way.

It is incomprehensible.

We were on tour in the Baltic States with my string quartet. After a concert in Vilnius, we were out at a disco partying.
That same night, Estonia sank.

Next morning, the violist from the Tallinn Quartet approached me with tears in his eyes, embracing me by the elevator on the way to breakfast at the hotel. I had not seen the news yet, did not know what had happened.

The organizers asked us if we could continue the tour. Each concert was then presented as a Requiem, and after
Beethoven’s Op. 59 No. 3, with which we concluded every concert, there was a profound silence. We stepped on and off the stage again, playing Oskar Lindberg’s “Ballad from Mockfjärd” while hearing the quiet weeping from the audience.

These small, newly independent countries, so geographically close to us, displayed such quiet yet superior human greatness as they carried us through the tour after the unimaginable tragedy of Estonia. 

A memory that will always remain.