We Want the Light

This is a re-release – on our own label for the first time – of our prize-winning DVD, We Want the Light.

Music by Mahler, Mechthild Bach, Bruch, Elisabeth Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schubert, Bloch und Brahms.

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.