The State visit of the kings to Finland is leaving us moments filled with significance. It is the first trip to the Nordic country by Felipe and Letizia, 37 years after Don Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía did the same in 1989. In just 72 hours and with an express agenda, our monarchs arrive with the aim of showing Spain’s commitment to Finnish security and defense, supporting the Spanish community there, and strengthening commercial ties. It is well known that in this kind of meeting every gesture counts and carries a message (as we saw a few days ago at the gala dinner in honor of the Macrons) and, in the presence of Doña Letizia, a chorus of students delivered an incredibly powerful message of peace at a Helsinki school by singing Que canten los niños, by José Luis Perales.
Within the official agenda of the kings’ second day in Finland, Doña Letizia has visited together with the First Lady Suzanne Innes-Stubb Käpylä School in Helsinki, a teaching center where a bilingual Spanish-Finnish program is taught and which had already been the scene of a funny moment from Don Felipe. The king, when referring to her in a speech before the Spanish community in the country, stumbled over the pronunciation of the name and, in a very natural gesture, turned toward his wife to advise her “practice, because you are going to visit it.”
The well-known center with an unpronounceable name (at least for Don Felipe) in Helsinki is one of the country’s reference schools, as it offers a bilingual Spanish-Finnish program and is the only one in Finland that provides partial instruction of the curriculum in Spanish, in addition to teaching it as an optional language, according to its website. And the students of the center wanted to demonstrate their good use of our language and have welcomed Doña Letizia and the First Lady with a legendary song from the national songbook: Que canten los niños, by José Luis Perales.
Queen Letizia attends the performance of the choir of Let the Children Sing.
Let the Children Sing, Perales’ Solidarity Anthem
I must admit that, since I first saw the video of the schoolchildren singing (with very good rhythm) the famous Perales song in front of Doña Letizia’s attentive gaze, the verses keep echoing in my head: «let the children sing / raise their voices / let the world hear. / Let their voices unite and reach the Sun / for in them lies the truth». But the story behind this Spanish version of an Imagine is much more than a catchy lyric and, probably, it has not been chosen at random.
José Luis Perales released Que canten los niños in 1986 as part of his album With the Passage of Time. But it wasn’t just another track on the record: composed and performed by the singer-songwriter, it actually originated from Aldeas Infantiles SOS as a charitable song in favor of children after the musician’s trip to Latin America, where he witnessed firsthand the reality lived by millions of children.
After visiting the NGO’s work in his native Cuenca, Perales traveled to Argentina. “I wanted to know what it was like and they took me to a village near Buenos Aires. There were orphaned children, marginalized from society, from the street, who were taken in by centers run by volunteer women,” he said years ago in an interview.
Queen Letizia with the First Lady of Finland.
Used for forty years as a hymn of peace and brotherhood, a song to the freedom of the youngest and a call to raise voices for those who cannot, Que canten los niños is not only a song that makes this terrible reality visible: José Luis Perales permanently ceded the song’s copyright to Aldeas Infantiles SOS and, since its publication, all royalties generated by the reproduction and sale of the piece have been used to fund humanitarian aid projects and sustain its child communities around the world.
With the chorus of Finnish children who have sung its famous verses before the attentive and moved gaze of Doña Letizia, the song’s lyrics took on even more meaning: in the tense and polarized world we live in, Finland is the European country that shares the most border with Russia and, at the outset of the Ukraine war, this same anthem was used by a group of students from Kyiv’s Notas Alegres music school to claim their right to peace. Then Perales himself stated: «I feel a deep emotion to see that a song can serve to ease in some way the great pain of the children in this cruel war of which they are victims».
