Tonight We Sing
1953 film by Mitchell Leisen
Tonight We Sing is a 1953 American musical biopic film directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring David Wayne, Ezio Pinza, and Roberta Peters. It is based on the life and career of the celebrated impresario Sol Hurok.
The film is based on the 1946 book Impresario, an autobiography written by Sol Hurok with the help of Ruth Goode, who once served as Hurok's press agent. The film credits Hurok as technical advisor.
Plot
Cast
David Wayne as Sol Hurok
Ezio Pinza as Feodor Chaliapin
Roberta Peters as Elsa Valdine
Anne Bancroft as Emma Hurok
Tamara Toumanova as Anna Pavlova
Isaac Stern as Eugène Ysaÿe
Byron Palmer as Gregory Lawrence
Jan Peerce as Gregory Lawrence's singing voice
Oskar Karlweis as Benjamin Golder
Mikhail Rasumny as Nicolai
Steven Geray as Prager
Walter Woolf King as Gritti
Lela Bliss as Mrs. Granek
Harry Hayden as Mr. Granek
Oscar Beregi as Dr. Markoff
Isabel Withers as Emma's Maid
Dudley Dickerson as Porter
George E. Stone as Impresario
Bertha Rosemond as Singer performing Joseph Barnby's "Sweet and Low" at Bronx Settlement House student recital (uncredited)
Music
The film features performances of works from classical composers: Chopin, Gounod, Kreisler, Leoncavallo, Mussorgsky, Puccini, Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns, Sarasate, Verdi and Wieniawski. The film includes opera arias, duets and staged scenes from the operas: Boris Goudonov, Faust, Madama Butterfly, and La Traviata. Tamara Toumanova, in her role as Pavlova, performs in three ballet scenes within the film.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tonight We Sing” as 1953 film by Mitchell Leisen. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1953 film by Mitchell Leisen. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7821467. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953 and 1946.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tonight We Sing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.