Max Reinhardt

Max Reinhardt: The Man Who Rebuilt the Space Between Stage and Seat

By 1930, a Viennese banker's son who once trained as a bank apprentice controlled eleven stages across Berlin. He had founded a summer festival that still runs every year in a cathedral square. And he had done it all under a stage name he adopted at seventeen, discarding the surname Goldmann for one that would become, in theatre history, a synonym for spectacle rebuilt from first principles.

From Baden to the Berlin Stage

Born Maximilian Goldmann on September 9, 1873, in Baden bei Wien to Rosa and Wilhelm Goldmann, a merchant from Stupava, Reinhardt began an apprenticeship in banking while quietly taking acting lessons on the side. He made his stage debut in Vienna in 1890 under the name Max Reinhardt, performed at the Salzburg City Theatre by 1893, and in 1894 moved to Berlin to join the Deutsches Theater ensemble under the director Otto Brahm — the company he would eventually come to own outright.

An Empire of Stages

Reinhardt's rise through Berlin theatre was less a career than an accumulation of institutions. In 1901 he co-founded the cabaret venue Schall und Rauch; by 1903 he ran the Neues Theater; in 1906 he acquired the Deutsches Theater itself, the anchor of his growing empire. He directed the Volksbühne from 1915 to 1918, reopened the Großes Schauspielhaus in 1919 in a radical Expressionist conversion by the architect Hans Poelzig, and from 1924 managed the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. By the end of the 1920s his name was attached to eleven Berlin stages at once — an unprecedented concentration of theatrical power built not on ownership for its own sake but on a specific, restless artistic conviction.

Breaking the Wall Between Actor and Audience

That conviction was simple to state and difficult to execute: theatre had allowed too wide a gulf to open between the people performing and the people watching, and it was Reinhardt's task to close it. He fused stage design, language, music, and choreography into single integrated productions rather than treating them as separate crafts stacked on top of a text, and he borrowed staging ideas from Greek amphitheatre and medieval mystery play alike to physically collapse the distance between actor and spectator. The clearest instance came on December 23, 1917, when he premiered Reinhard Sorge's *Der Bettler* (The Beggar), a production credited with single-handedly launching theatrical Expressionism — and, through it, an entire visual vocabulary later absorbed into German cinema. In one sequence, characters conversed in front of a closed curtain while disembodied voices sounded from behind it, a disorienting spatial trick that made audiences newly conscious of the theatrical apparatus itself rather than letting them forget it.

Salzburg and Everyman

Reinhardt's most durable creation was not a single production but an institution: in 1920, together with the composer Richard Strauss and the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he founded the Salzburg Festival, conceived as a cultural answer to the devastation of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg world that had produced it. His 1917 proposal for a purpose-built festival hall at Hellbrunn was never realized, so instead he staged Hofmannsthal's adaptation of the medieval morality play *Jedermann* (Everyman) in Salzburg's cathedral square, using the city itself — its baroque facades and open sky — as scenery no theatre could replicate indoors. That production is credited with the festival's official founding, and its open-air staging of *Jedermann* has run nearly every year since, a rare case of an artistic experiment becoming a permanent civic tradition. Reinhardt continued to direct the festival until 1937.

The Castle and the Schools

In 1918 Reinhardt purchased Schloss Leopoldskron, a baroque palace outside Salzburg, and turned it into both a private residence and an informal cultural salon with its own garden theatre and library — the estate would later become internationally recognizable as a filming location for *The Sound of Music*, though Reinhardt himself had no connection to that later production. He also built an educational legacy alongside his theatrical one, founding what became known as the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, still regarded as one of the most important German-language acting schools, as well as acting institutions in Berlin. When he later relocated to Hollywood, he acquired a workshop on Sunset Boulevard — reportedly won in a poker game — where students who passed through his classes included Shirley Temple, Alan Ladd, and Angie Dickinson, evidence that his instinct for training actors survived the collapse of his European institutions.

Exile and the Final American Years

Reinhardt's Jewish ancestry made him a target the moment Nazi ideology took hold. His 1935 Warner Brothers film of *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, starring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney, was banned in Germany by the Propaganda Ministry, in part because Joseph Goebbels condemned Expressionism as degenerate art and in part because Reinhardt, the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and the arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold were all of Jewish descent. After the 1938 Anschluss annexed Austria, Reinhardt emigrated first to Britain and then to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1940. Leopoldskron was seized by the Nazi state and only restored to his family after the war. In America he staged productions including *The Eternal Road* (1937) and Thornton Wilder's *The Merchant of Yonkers* (1938), continuing to work almost until his death from a stroke in New York City on October 30, 1943, at age seventy — never living to see the regime that had exiled him defeated.

Why Max Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Reinhardt not for a single invention but for an unmatched range: he was simultaneously a working actor, a director who reconceived what staging could do, an impresario who ran a dozen theatres as functioning businesses, an institution-builder who founded a festival still running more than a century later, and an educator whose schools trained generations of actors on two continents. Contemporary theatre historians Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy called him "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times," and the scholar Martin Esslin dubbed him theatre's "High Priest of Theatricality" — praise for range and audacity of vision rather than for any singular technical breakthrough. The honest counter-case is that Reinhardt was, by his own account and his critics', more a synthesizer and impresario of genius than an originator of wholly new ideas: he borrowed from Greek and medieval staging traditions, from architects like Poelzig, and from playwrights like Hofmannsthal, and his genius lay in combining and scaling those borrowings into productions and institutions of unprecedented ambition. It is craft and organizational vision as much as pure originality — but craft exercised at a scale nobody before him had attempted.

Legacy

The Salzburg Festival Reinhardt co-founded remains one of the world's most prestigious performing arts events, its open-air *Jedermann* still an annual fixture in the cathedral square he chose as a stage. His archive is preserved at Binghamton University in New York, and Berlin marked the site of his former theatre with a memorial in 2015. Michael Frayn's 2008 play *Afterlife*, staged at London's National Theatre, dramatized his life directly — confirmation that a director once known for erasing the boundary between stage and audience has himself become a durable subject for the stage.