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We Want the Light

Barenboim, Daniel

Kissin, Evgeny

Perlman, Itzhak

Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita

Herz, Alice Sommer

Zukerman, Pinchas

Cologne Opera Chorus

Conductor: Ashkenazy, Vladimir

Cologne Gurzenich Orchestra

Television Director: Nupen, Christopher

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Actor: Barenboim, Daniel

Actor: Kissin, Evgeny

Actor: Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita

Actor: Perlman, Itzhak

Actor: Herz, Alice Sommer

Actor: Zukerman, Pinchas

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Year of Production: 2004

Playing Time: 00:59:38

Catalogue Number: NUPEN039

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The title is taken from a poem by a 12-year-old girl, Eva Pickova, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Her words provide both the title and the climax—in a setting for two choruses and orchestra by the American composer Franz Waxman, in his touching work The Song of Terezin.

It is a film is about many things. It is about freedom and captivity, about emancipation, acculturation and assimilation; it is about the roles played by Moses and Felix Mendelssohn in the dream of fruitful, unproblematic integration of the Jews into German society after their liberation from the ghettos; it is about Richard Wagner, his ferociously anti-Semitic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (The Jews in Music) and his influence on the thinking of the Third Reich but, most of all, it is a film about how much music can mean to people, even in the direst of circumstances, or particularly in the direst circumstances.