Reinhardt, Max [né Goldmann] (1873–1943), director and producer. The famed Austro‐German showman first came to the attention of most American playgoers in 1912 when Winthrop Ames imported his mounting of the Oriental pantomime Sumurun. In 1924 Reinhardt visited New York to re‐create his production of The Miracle, and then in 1927 brought over his German company for a season of repertory. Following the rise of the Nazis, he moved permanently to America where he staged his version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood in 1934 and The Eternal Road in New York in 1937. Other Broadway directorial credits included Thornton Wilder's The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) and Irwin Shaw's Sons and Soldiers (1943). Reinhardt's version of Die Fledermaus was offered to Broadway as Rosalinda (1942) by his son Gottfried shortly before the elder's death.

• Born: Sep 08, 1873 in Baden, near Vienna, Austria
• Died: Oct 31, 1943
• Occupation: Director
• Active: '30s
• Major Genres: Romance, Fantasy
• Career Highlights: A Midsummer Night's Dream
• First Major Screen Credit: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

Biography

German director Max Reinhardt had a tremendous effect on early filmmakers the world over. Some of his protégés include F.W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Ernst Lubitsch, and Otto Preminger. He was born Maximilian Goldman in Baden, Austria. He first gained notice as a producer and director of plays and during the early 20th century was one of German theater's most influential figures. His innovative stage work had great effect on early directors. Reinhardt's greatest contribution was his role in the development of both Kammerspiel (chamber dramas done in a minimalist and naturalistic style) and expressionist cinema following WWI. But despite his effect on films, Reinhardt only actually directed a handful of silent and sound films, notably the American version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), which he directed with William Dieterle. At one point he owned a large chain of theaters in Austria and Germany, but lost them all when the Nazis took over Germany. Shortly after their rise to power, Reinhardt left Germany and after touring Europe, settled in the U.S. where he spent the rest of his life. There he continued working on-stage as a director and producer. He also founded a Hollywood-based theater workshop and an acting school in New York. His son, Gottfried Reinhardt, became a movie producer. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A Midsummer Night's Dream Buy this Movie

The talent and accomplishments of Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) contributed to the modern idea of the director as creative artist. He was an innovator and experimentor with both space and stage techniques and was one of the first directors to develop repertory companies.

Max Reinhardt was born Max Goldman in Baden, near Vienna, on September 9, 1873. His family moved to Vienna in 1877, and it was there he began acting under the name of Max Reinhardt in 1890. For the next ten years he played many roles, first in Vienna, then in Berlin under Otto Brahm at the Deutsches Theatre, and gradually established himself as a performer.

His first production as a director occurred in 1900 when he directed Ibsen's Love's Comedy. Shortly thereafter he opened his own cabaret in Berlin. He left Brahm and the Deutsches Theatre and became director of the Kleines Theatre and the Neues Theatre in 1903. During the next two years he would direct Midsummer Night's Dream, open an acting school, and purchase the Deutsches Theatre. These actions marked the beginning of a long career in which Reinhardt owned or managed many theaters, directed or produced over 500 plays in a variety of settings; toured Germany, Europe, and the United States; and established himself as a most versatile and innovative director.

As a director Reinhardt was always in search of the "right" theater for each play he worked on. He used small cabaret and chamber theaters for intimate productions and arena theaters for his more spectacular ones. In the smaller spaces he presented such works as Salome and The Lower Depths because of the strong actor-audience proximity. The Neues and the Deutsches theaters were larger and better suited for such works as The Merchant of Venice or King Lear. In his famous playhouse, Kammerspiel, he directed Ghosts, Man and Superman, and Lysistra. But in his arena theater the Circus Schumann, which was later to become the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Reinhardt tried to realize his dream of a "Theatre of Five Thousand." He hoped to have a playhouse on the scale of the Greek and Roman theaters, one in which spectacle and ritual reached a large number of spectators who would be part of the communal-like event. The Grosses Schauspielhaus, which he built in 1919, was a vast domed arena that seated 3,000 people and had a giant thrust stage and a large revolve. There were no curtains, and behind the stage there was a permanent cyclorama. Such spaces were ideal for his productions of classics such as Aeschylus' Oresteia.

Among his other experiments with space were his spectacles such as The Miracle, a play for which he converted the interior of the Olympia theater in New York into a gothic cathedral; his outdoor productions such as Faust, for which a Faust City was built and added to each year when the play was produced; and his famous presentation of Hofmannsthal's Everyman at the annual Salzburg festival. The play was staged in front of the cathedral and utilized buildings in the town as part of the production. Another spectacular work of Hofmannsthal's that Reinhardt directed at the festival was The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World. He also directed a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Oxford and used the natural outdoor setting to enhance the play.

Reinhardt was not only an innovator and experimentor with space, he was also an innovator and experimentor with stage techniques. An eclectic as a director, Reinhardt broke with those who favored realism and tried his hand at symbolic drama, impressionism, and naturalism. He also rejected the limitations of the proscenium stage. He favored more the freedom of the Elizabethan stage where actor and audience were in close contact with one another and where the stage could be used with great flexibility. He believed in the fluid use of set and symbolic use of lighting and was among the first to use the revolve for quick scene changes. He experimented repeatedly with the concept that a dramatic work was a total work of art, one that depended upon a mixing of the arts - of the visual, aural, scenic, and musical elements in drama.

Reinhardt also believed that the most important factor in the play was the actor. He was at the center of the art of the theater. Theater was at its best when the director, writer, designer, and composer had all imaginatively assumed the actor's part. While it is the case that Reinhardt held the actor in high regard and was one of the first directors to develop repertory companies, he was such a formidable force in the theater that he greatly enhanced the role of the director. His talent and accomplishments contributed to the modern idea of the director as a creative artist, a person capable of making aesthetic decisions. Reinhardt represented a controlling intelligence that guided the entire production in a vital and peculiarly identifiable manner.

In the early 1930s the Nazi regime forced Reinhardt to give up his theaters. In 1934 he signed a contract with Warner Brothers. He also directed A Midsummer Night's Dream in California and Chicago. Then in 1935 he made a film version of the play for Warner Brothers. He emigrated to the United States in 1937 and later opened the Max Reinhardt Actors Workshop for Stage, Screen, and Radio in Hollywood. He suffered a stroke in 1943 and died in New York City.

Further Reading

A critical biography is J. L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (1982). Other useful works include Huntley Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (1969) and Oliver M. Sayler, Max Reinhardt and His Theatre (1968).

Additional Sources

Reinhardt, Gottfried, The genius: a memoir of Max Reinhardt, New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1979.

Styan, J. L., Max Reinhardt, Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

For more information on Max Reinhardt, visit Britannica.com.

Reinhardt, Max, adopted name of M. Goldmann (Baden nr. Vienna, 1873-1943, New York), an actor who became one of the most prominent theatrical producers in Germany and Austria during the first four decades of the 20th c. From 1894 he was in Berlin, at first under O. Brahm, and later in the Neues Theater (1903-6). He turned away from Naturalistic techniques and developed an imaginative style of production for which he found added scope and facilities, including the revolving stage, at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin (1905-20 and 1924-33; he owned it until 1933, when he was forced to hand his Berlin theatres over ‘to the German people’). He also founded the cabaret Schall und Rauch and, later, his own school of acting. His production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1905) marked a climax in his public recognition. In 1906 he opened his Kammerspiele with Ghosts by Ibsen and in 1919 the Großes Schauspielhaus with the Oresteia; all houses served his wide repertory and a versatile style that drew from all the arts and was based on his belief in an inherent link between new and old. The Großes Schauspielhaus, the so-called ‘Theatre of the Five Thousand’, was built on the site of Circus Schumann, which he had used as an arena theatre (for König Ödipus and Jedermann by Hofmannsthal, in 1910 and 1911) that established his world-wide reputation.

In the Berlin of the 1920s Reinhardt's illusionary theatre formed a stark contrast to the anti-illusionary theatre of E. Piscator, and the range of his productions was flexible and even unpredictable. In 1913 he collaborated with G. Hauptmann in the centenary celebrations of Germany's liberation from Napoleonic occupation, and in 1928 he surprised his Berlin audiences with a production of Die Fledermaus by J. Strauß, in collaboration with E. W. Korngold (1897-1957). From 1917 Reinhardt was prominently associated with the planning and running of the Salzburger Festspiele, which resulted in a close collaboration with H. von Hofmannsthal, an admirer of Reinhardt's stage techniques in indoor and open-air performances. In 1924 Reinhardt took over the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, which remained the centre of his activities and where, in 1928, he founded the Max Reinhardt Seminar. His emigration, in 1937, to the USA was accompanied by the loss of his considerable fortune. The Workshop for Stage, Screen and Radio and his film production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935, with music by F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and E. W. Korngold) mark his exile. For some twenty-five years Helene Thimig collaborated with Reinhardt, who married her in 1932. Remarkable in her own right, she re-established the Reinhardt Seminar after her return from emigration.

A volume of letters, speeches, and essays (Ausgewählte Briefe, Reden, Schriften), ed. F. Hadamowsky, appeared in 1963, and the correspondence of A. Schnitzler with Reinhardt (Briefwechsel Arthur Schnitzlers mit Max Reinhardt), ed. R. Wagner, in 1971.

1873–1943, Austrian theatrical producer and director, originally named Max Goldmann. After acting under Otto Brahm at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, he managed (1902–5) his own theater, where he produced more than 50 plays. He was director of the Deutsches Theater after 1905 and of the smaller Kammerspiele, which he built in 1906. Reinhardt often used the entire auditorium for a production, seeking to bridge the gap between actor and audience by placing the spectator within the action. He staged gigantic productions, full of pageantry and color, and was especially noted for his direction of mob scenes. His settings, which incorporated the ideas of Appia and Craig, were masterfully executed. Among his world-famous productions were The Lower Depths, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Faust, Oedipus Rex, and The Miracle. He was also one of the first to stage the plays of the expressionists after World War I. In 1919 he opened an enormous arena theater, the Grosses Schauspielhaus (“Theatre of the Five Thousand”), and in 1920 he was among the founders of the Salzburg Festival, where he annually staged Everyman with the Austrian Alps as his backdrop. In 1933 he was forced by the Nazis to flee Germany. In the United States he directed a movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and a stage pageant with music by Kurt Weill, The Eternal Road (1934, produced 1937). He became a U.S. citizen in 1940.

Bibliography

See H. Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (1914, repr. 1964); J. L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (1982).