We Want The Light - Christopher Nupen's Holocaust Film

Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Evgeny Kissin, Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, plus three inspiring survivors: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Jacques Stroumsa, Alice Sommer Herz and others.

This is a DVD 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 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 DVD about how much music can mean to people, even in the direst of circumstances, or particularly in the direst circumstances.

The title, We Want the Light, 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 work The Song of Terezin. The DVD also contains music by Mahler, Bach, Schoenberg, Bruch, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schubert, Bloch and Brahms.

The Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne
The Cologne Opera Chorus
The Cologne Cathedral Children s Choir
conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy~ We Want The Light - Christopher Nupen's Holocaust Film