Mendele Lohengrin, a klezmer singspiel by composer Evgeni Orkin and librettist Martin Valdés-Stauber (2025), was created as a project for the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich under the direction of Daniel Grossmann. In its Czech premiere for the Eternal Hope (Věčná naděje) festival, it opens up space not only for reflection on the Jewish experience in the modern world but also for more general contemplation of the experience of moving between distinct musical worlds. This text follows the storyline of the singspiel inspired by Heinrich York-Steiner's 1898 short story and asks what Mendele's story tells us about aesthetic fascination, antisemitism, and the boundaries of access—then and now.
The hero of the singspiel—a musical-theatrical genre combining singing with the spoken word—is a poor musician, a klezmer named Mendele from Martinsdorf, who fulfills a dream using his modest savings and travels to the Vienna Opera. By chance, he hears Wagner's Lohengrin there, and the experience shakes him so deeply that upon his return to the shtetl, he refuses to play the traditional repertoire at weddings and celebrations, wishing only to perform Wagner. However, what represents musical enlightenment for him becomes madness and a scandal for his community—and gradually a personal tragedy for him as he is confronted with Wagner's antisemitic treatise Judaism in Music.
The source material is the 1898 short story Mendele Lohengrin: die Geschichte eines Musikanten by Heinrich Elchanan York-Steiner, an Austrian-Jewish theater critic and Zionist from Theodor Herzl's circle. He published it in the Zionist newspaper Die Welt—and this context is essential: the text was intended for an audience of urban, secularized Jewry at the turn of the century, who shared the cultural aspirations and tensions of European modernity. The character of the klezmer Mendele therefore does not represent an "authentic voice of tradition" but rather a literary construct. The story can be read as a satire on the desire for assimilation, cultural self-alienation, and the Jewish infatuation with German high culture, which simultaneously shatters against antisemitism. This satirical framework is adopted by the contemporary libretto, which develops it on a musical-theatrical level.
For the Czech public, klezmer is still not a self-evident term. It is often reduced to a few sonic stereotypes—the "crying" clarinet, wedding revelry, a nostalgic vision of Eastern European Jewry—or to the revivalist concert aesthetics of recent decades. Yet klezmer is much more: it is a historically fluid musical world of Ashkenazi Jews that formed around the musical profession of the same name as early as the Middle Ages in Central Europe, later in Eastern Europe, and was further transformed in the diaspora, especially in the USA, following the migrations and catastrophes of the 20th century. We intentionally choose the word "world"—along with ethnomusicologist Zuzana Jurková—instead of the word "genre" or "culture," which can lead to the idea of something fixed and closed. A musical world is a community of people who share a certain way of performing music, its values, and its purpose, and who constantly recreate it. From this perspective, Mendele Lohengrin is exceptionally rewarding material: the entire plot is based on the collision of two such worlds.
The Yiddish word 'klezmer' combines two Hebrew roots: 'kley' (instruments) and 'zemer' (melody). Klezmers (klezmorim) acted as professional players primarily at weddings and celebrations, where their task was to organize ritual time and manage the community's emotions—from ritualized weeping during the seating of the bride to ecstatic joy during circle dances. Klezmer as a musical profession also has roots in the Czech lands: in the early modern period, Prague was among the significant centers of Jewish instrumental musicianship, and the existence of a guild of Jewish musicians is documented from at least 1641.
Walter Zev Feldman, a leading researcher in the field of klezmer, explains that in the traditional shtetl environment, klezmer functioned primarily as a participatory musical practice: the music was not intended for passive listening but was an inseparable part of the wedding ritual. Klezmers were not "artists" in the modern sense but service providers: they played "on request," a piece lasted as long as people danced, and the rhythm had to be predictable so that as many people as possible could participate.
At the same time, klezmers functioned as "musical polyglots": they mastered the klezmer musical language and repertoire intended for the internal Jewish world. This language was full of modal nuances, rich ornamentation, and spiritual meanings understood only within the community. Simultaneously, they knew the repertoire and style of playing intended for those outside the community so they could provide professional service to non-Jewish neighbors. In those cases, they would play polonaises, mazurkas, or local folklore. Ethnomusicology refers to this ability to "switch" between musical worlds as bimusicality, an equivalent of bilingualism, which was typical for Eastern European Jews and allowed them to survive economically and culturally for centuries.
The moment Mendele, upon his return from Vienna, refuses to submit to what is expected of a klezmer at a wedding, he arouses more than just aesthetic disapproval—he threatens the ritual performance itself and the function of music within it. His rebellion is more radical than it seems: it is not just about choosing a different repertoire, but about disrupting the social purpose of music. It is here that the difference between participatory and presentational musical regimes becomes apparent—two distinct ideas of what music actually is and what it is supposed to do.
Mendele's journey to Vienna is stylized as an initiatory experience. In the Vienna Opera, he sits high up in the second gallery, where he sees nothing but hears everything in an unusually vast silence. He experiences a state of emotional rapture and falls into inconsolable weeping. Two young conservatory students explain to him that "Wagner is a great musical prophet, he fought against the old bad music, invented new music, and brought it to the world" and that "the task of every honest artist is to suppress any other music."
In York-Steiner's short story, the counterpart to the musical world of the klezmers is not the world of European art music in general, but specifically Richard Wagner as one of its extremes. Here, Wagner is not just a famous composer and a symbol of "high" culture—he is the bearer of a different, exceptionally escalated presentational musical regime and cultural values incommensurable with klezmer, as well as specifically of antisemitism.
Wagner's music, brought to maximum aesthetic and ideological autonomy, demands distance and silence from the audience; it claims sacred reverence and sacrifice. As a modern project, it speaks the language of universal validity but functions as an exclusive, hierarchical, and exclusionary project. Mendele is fascinated not only by a different musical language—he also adopts a value system in which his previous world is no longer merely "different," but also "low" and "bad," while Wagner appears to him as a musical truth of an almost divine order.
The attempt to play the overture from Lohengrin at a wedding feast already foreshadows what is truly at stake in Mendele's story: the limit encountered by the movement between musical worlds—from three sides at once. The Wagnerian sound is, by its nature, non-transferable to the context of a klezmer wedding—and that is precisely what makes Mendele a fool in the eyes of the community. Furthermore, Wagner denied that Jews could be full participants in German musical culture.
Yet, movement between musical worlds in itself was nothing exceptional in Jewish history—on the contrary. Many Jewish musicians mastered several musical languages and were able to switch between them with extraordinary creativity and success. The capacity for musical polyglotism, which for centuries allowed klezmers to hold their own among different communities, becomes in Mendele's case an instrument of collision with the barriers of the specific Wagnerian sound, with social and ideological walls, and ultimately a source of self-alienation. The "boring strum, strum," as Mendele calls it, used to form the heartbeat of his service to the community. Now, after meeting the Wagnerian ideal, it tortures him with its ordinariness. He believes that by adopting these standards, he will become part of that "noble" Wagnerian world—and it is here that the deepest abyss opens: to the world that fascinates him, he remains merely an "alien element" that Wagner essentially despises. Mendele's illusion finally shatters when Rabbi Modsche's son confronts him directly: "Listen, Reb Mendele, they say you are interested in Wagner and want to introduce Martinsdorf to him at any cost! Do you also know that this Wagner fellow terribly hates Jews?"
Wagner's antisemitism was not a marginal personal trait, but a sophisticated, publicly formulated ideology. In his treatise Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850), he interpreted what we today call musical polyglotism as "parasitic mimicry": to him, the Jewish musician was not a sovereign mediator but a cultural chameleon who only outwardly imitates European forms without being able to internally understand them. His attack was directed not only against an abstract "Jewry" but against specific successful Jewish musicians—Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer—who personified Jewish success in the music of the majority society.
Mendele's tragedy culminates in feverish scenes where he tears pages from Wagner's very treatise Judaism in Music. He confronts his "old God" with that Wagnerian faith in which Jewish worship is merely "soulless babble." And he destroys his instrument—the bassette, which for generations had connected him with the community, became in the light of the Wagnerian ideal a symbol of "lowness" that could no longer be endured. And yet, the gesture of breaking the instrument is not a surrender—it is the rage of a man who had the courage and creativity to cross boundaries.
Wagner's ambivalence has not disappeared to this day. His work remains a central part of the world opera repertoire, but its reception is permanently burdened by both Wagner's own antisemitism and the Nazi appropriation of his work and symbolism—including the symbolism of the Grail—as a tool for the construction of Aryan identity. In post-war Israel, Wagner's music became the subject of an informal but deeply felt boycott, perceived as an act of piety toward Holocaust survivors. Conductor Daniel Barenboim's controversial attempt to break this taboo in Jerusalem in 2001 sparked a stormy debate—and showed that the question of whether Wagner's music can be separated from his antisemitism and its Nazi misuse remains open.
Therefore, it is precise that the singspiel Mendele Lohengrin is not constructed as a satire with a simple condemnation nor as a defense of such a separation—rather, it shows how deeply aesthetic fascination and historical trauma can be intertwined. It does not aim to be a historical document. Beside the narrator's voice and instrumental klezmer, Evgeni Orkin inserts Yiddish songs performed by a soprano. He works consciously with anachronism: into a story from the end of the 19th century, he inserts American Yiddish hits by composers such as Abraham Ellstein or Sholom Secunda from the 1940s, and moreover, a publicly singing female voice—historically unimaginable in the context of the traditional shtetl. Thus, he does not represent the "voice of the old shtetl," but klezmer as part of the modern, diasporic, and transnational culture of the New York Yiddish theater.
The cultural conflict represented in the singspiel is not a simple battle between "tradition" and "modernity." It is a clash of different modernities: one growing out of Jewish musical worlds, built on translation and movement, and the other—Wagnerian, aesthetic, and ideological—which proclaims itself the only universal norm. The inserted Yiddish hits serve as a reminder that while Mendele was destroying himself in an attempt to enter the Wagnerian musical world, a new, confident Jewish musical world was emerging in the diaspora in the meantime—without the need for outside permission.
The creators of the singspiel do not pretend to be returning the lost world of the shtetl to us. On the contrary: through anachronisms and clashes of genres, they show that any attempt at an "authentic rest" in a single identity is impossible today. Mendele Lohengrin is not a historical excursion but a metaphor for our present, in which ideas of home are again becoming tools for excluding and dehumanizing the other. Mendele reminds us that any attempt at exclusive ownership of any cultural "Grail" ends only in ruins and broken instruments. And yet, he remains an inspiration: his courage and perceptiveness in crossing the boundaries of musical worlds are more valuable than any such quest for exclusivity.
For the Eternal Hope (Věčná naděje) festival, Mendele Lohengrin is fitting not only because of Prague's symbolic position as one of the historical "cradles" of klezmer, but primarily because it offers an encounter with the complexity of the Jewish musical experience in Europe: with movement between different musical worlds, straddling village and city, tradition and modernity, minority and majority, fascination and exclusion, historical continuity and its violent interruption. This corresponds to the profile of the festival, which does not seek a museum-like display of the past but its contemporary contemplation through music and memory.
Prague was an important node where different Jewish musical worlds intersected—before these continuities were violently severed in the 20th century. Therefore, presenting such projects in Prague has a twofold effect: on the one hand, it opens up a European context; on the other, it painfully recalls the absence of full continuity. And it reminds us of something even more fundamental: that the Holocaust, which afflicted Czechoslovak Jews, did not just happen to "them"—it happened to us all, and we carry its consequences together. In this sense, the Prague performance of Mendele Lohengrin is more than a guest appearance by a foreign ensemble: it is an entry into the debate on how the past and present of Jewish culture appear in the Czech public space.
Selected Literature
Feldman, Walter Zev. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Gruber, Ruth Ellen. Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. University of California Press, 2002.
Jurková, Zuzana. Pražské hudební světy (Prague Musical Worlds). Prague: Karolinum, 2013.
Ottens, Rita, and Joel Rubin. Klezmeři (Klezmer Musicians). Prague: H&H, 2003.
Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
