Max Reinhardt

Max Reinhardt (born September 9, 1873, Baden, near Vienna, Austria—died October 31, 1943, New York, NewYork, U.S.) was one of the first theatrical directors to achieve widespread recognition as a major creative artist, working in Berlin, Salzburg, New York City, and Hollywood. He helped found the annual Salzburg Festival.

Discovery of the theatre

Reinhardt was the eldest of seven children born to Wilhelm and Rose Goldmann, an Orthodox Jewish couple. Though his parents were remote from theatrical life, they were sympathetic to his fascination with the actors of the Vienna Burgtheater, and, at the urging of one of these, they allowed their son to exchange his boredom as a bank clerk for the excitement of drama school. Although he proved to be an inhibited actor, needing a beard and heavy makeup to release his talents, Reinhardt won local fame and friends in Salzburg. In 1894 he succumbed to an invitation from Otto Brahm, who had brought the drama of Henrik Ibsen to Germany, to join his Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He had assumed the stage name Reinhardt some time prior to moving to Berlin.

Reinhardt learned much from Brahm but was never wholeheartedly committed to the naturalism of his productions. He tired of “sticking a beard…and eating noodles and sauerkraut on stage every night,” which latter activity was required by Brahm’s notion of realism, in which nothing was to be simulated. This was not to be his direction in theatre. Quick to make friends despite his shyness, he met other young artists in cafés. From their gatherings there emerged a lighthearted revue, Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), to which Reinhardt contributed sketches. Playing before invited audiences, it was so successful that it was transformed into a serious work and settled into the Kleines Theater in 1902. Reinhardt planned a full season and directed his first play, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

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theatre: The influence of Reinhardt

Career in full flower

Reinhardt exhibited his ability to make the right contact at the right time when he produced 14,000 marks to placate Brahm, who was furious over his breach of contract. He took over the Neues Theater in 1903, and his career moved ahead rapidly. By the end of 1904, he had directed 42 plays. His early landmark of genius was the production in 1905 of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Reinhardt’s staging was swift, light, and joyous, capturing for audiences the theatrical brilliance that had been buried for so long beneath productions devoted to a ponderous, reverent delivery of Shakespeare’s words.

The young director became famous overnight. Offered the artistic directorship of the Deutsches Theater, he would settle for nothing less than ownership. He purchased it for 1,000,000 marks, and at age 32 he had reached the pinnacle of his profession. He completely rebuilt the theatre, introducing the latest technological innovations in scenic design, and started a school. Purchasing a tavern next door, Reinhardt remodeled it into a small theatre for plays that needed intimacy with the audience. He summarized his new concept in theatre with the word Kammerspiele, “chamber plays.”

In his success, Reinhardt remained close to his family. He brought his brother Edmund, who suffered from depression, to Berlin and acted almost as his psychiatrist, setting him to work in the theatre to regain his confidence. Beginning in 1907, the Deutsches Theater toured throughout Europe and the United States. The production of The Miracle, which premiered in 1911 in London and played subsequently in New York City and European cities, was Reinhardt’s most spectacular work and, at the same time, probably the most characteristic. Reinhardt was fascinated by the emotional richness of Roman Catholic rites and Gregorian chants. His production of The Miracle involved more than 2,000 actors, musicians, dancers, and other personnel. Performed without dramatic dialogue, it was a modern-day reunification of drama and ritual. It was pure theatre in the most archetypal sense.

If in The Miracle he re-created an ancient unity, Reinhardt was equally important in giving new life to many of the great dramas from the theatre’s past. His staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in 1910 initiated the first large-scale revival of classical Greek drama in more than 2,000 years. During the 1913–14 season he mounted new productions of 10 of the 22 Shakespearean plays he had directed, using few or no settings and creating a major Shakespearean revival. In 1911 he brought a modern point of view to opera with his direction of the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After many years he succeeded in helping to establish the Salzburg Festival, staging Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann (Everyman) in the city’s cathedral square in 1920. With Reinhardt’s support the Salzburg Festival became an annual event, bringing about a new interest in the dramas of the Middle Ages from which Jedermann was adapted.

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Return home and exile

Reinhardt had continued his work throughout World War I with no lessened sense of duty toward his art and his audience. In 1920, save for occasional engagements, he gave up direction of the Deutsches Theater. Retiring to a castle that he had purchased in Austria, he attempted to find in his native country the regard he had been accorded abroad. His home was a meeting place for international celebrities, but enemies prevented him from feeling at home in his hometown. He commuted in a circuit of Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg. When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, Reinhardt was luckily abroad. In a letter to the Nazi government that was a typical blend of conceit, irony, rejection of politics, and prophetic perception, he left his theatrical empire to the German people. The era of private management of such institutions as the theatre had passed, he wrote, and he foresaw that in the future it would be impossible to manage any such cultural undertakings without state backing.

After further work in Europe, Reinhardt moved to the United States in 1938. He opened a workshop in Hollywood, where he had made a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1934–35. His staging of Everyman in modern dress was followed by an unrealized plan for an all-black production of it. The final years of his life were filled with lesser fortunes and poor health, and he died speechless.

Legacy

A man of few words and little inclination or ability to develop or expound a dramatic theory, Reinhardt was a pragmatist whose instinctual feelings for the rightness of things transformed theatrical production in the 20th century. Before him, the idea of the director as a creative artist in his own right had been barely embryonic. With his work, the director emerged as the dynamic formative mind behind the production of a dramatic work.

Like the plots of the tragedies he so loved, Reinhardt’s life was a rise to the heights of success and a fall to a life of uprooted exile. With his first wife, Else Heims, a beautiful and sensual actress, he had two sons. His second wife, Helene Thimig, was also a beautiful actress but, like Reinhardt, a shy person moved by an immense inner force and alive with conflicting appearances. He was an introvert capable of extreme extroversion and Falstaffian laughter. He disliked sentimentality in others yet was himself filled with romantic sentiments, a combination of Viennese sensitivity and German discipline with cosmopolitanism. His work summed up all theatre before him and opened new vistas for the theatre that followed.