As a girl, she studied piano and progressed to a high level inspired by her music teacher who she idolized. She learned to play, and to love, Mozart and the wildly challenging Romantic piano music of Chopin, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff and Lizst.
A maker of ballet slippers lived and worked upstairs. He listened to opera on the radio as he worked, while, downstairs, the musical girl sat enchanted, following Madame Butterfly.
The cobbled streets rang with horses' hooves when Benita was growing up in Tallinn, going to private girls' school, skipping next door for her piano lessons. On birthdays, she remembers, one had only to stay at home and bake. Everyone knew it was your birthday and dropped in to share good wishes and the pastries. Then the music would begin. Benita holds in her heart a memory of the beautiful, spontaneous singing of her friends and neighbours at those birthday gatherings.
After high school, spending a year in England, Benita again met Richard Teng who she knew in Tallinn, he was a sea captain within his multigenerational, family run shipping company. Falling in love, they wrote letters, as he was often away at sea. Back in Estonia, in 1935, they married. Their son Jaan was born the next year and his brother Toivo in 1938. Read more from Estonian Life No. 19 – may 10, 2013
