Can a Jewish musician love Wagner? And what happens when a sincere devotion to art collides with a reality shaped by hatred? In the Jerusalem Synagogue, you are invited to experience a musical drama that is not merely a concert, but a powerful story of identity, uprootedness, and the loss of illusions.
The renowned Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich, under the direction of Daniel Grossmann, brings to Prague the unique singspiel Mendele Lohengrin. Inspired by an 1898 short story, the work revives a long-lost world while posing questions that remain deeply relevant today.
Mendele is a young klezmer musician from a small village who fulfills his lifelong dream—to visit imperial Vienna. There, he hears Wagner’s Lohengrin for the first time, an experience that changes his life forever. Captivated by this new music, he refuses to play anything else and earns the mocking nickname “Mendele Lohengrin” back home.
His passion, however, collides with a brutal truth: Richard Wagner, whose music Mendele adores, harbored deep hatred toward Jews. The moment the young man reads Wagner’s antisemitic writings, he destroys his instrument, and music in his village falls silent forever. This deeply moving story of the clash between klezmer tradition and European modernism leads you through emotions ranging from exhilaration to chilling silence.
The Jerusalem Synagogue (Jubilee Synagogue), with its colorful pseudo-Moorish architecture and Art Nouveau decoration, is one of Prague’s most beautiful sacred spaces. Its monumental interior, rich with murals and stained glass, provides the most powerful possible setting for the story of *Mendele Lohengrin*. An event in this space gains an additional dimension—it becomes a dialogue between the history of the building and the story told within it.
Come and hear a story about music that opens hearts—and prejudices that close them.
