Max Reinhardt (German: [maks ˈʁaɪnhaʁt] ; born Maximilian Goldmann; 9 September 1873 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his radically innovative and avant-garde stage productions, Reinhardt is regarded as one of the most prominent stage directors of the early 20th century.
For example, Reinhardt's 1917 stage premiere of Reinhard Sorge's Kleist Prize-winning stage play Der Bettler almost single-handedly gave birth to Expressionism in the theatre and ultimately in motion pictures as well. In 1920, Reinhardt established the Salzburg Festival by directing an open air production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's acclaimed adaptation of the Everyman Medieval mystery play in the square before the Cathedral with the Alps as a background. This remains an annual custom at the Salzburg Festival to this day.
Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy have dubbed Reinhardt, "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times", and write that his eventual arrival in the United States as a refugee from the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria followed a long and distinguished career, "inspired by the example of social participation in the ancient Greek and Medieval theatres", of seeking, "to bridge the separation between actors and audiences".
In 1935, Reinhardt directed his first and only motion picture in the United States through Warner Brothers, the Expressionist film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring James Cagney, Olivia De Havilland, and Mickey Rooney. The film was banned by the Ministry of Propaganda in an infamous example of censorship in Nazi Germany. This was due not only to Joseph Goebbels' belief that Expressionism was degenerate art, but even more so due to the Jewish ancestry of director Max Reinhardt, Classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn, and soundtrack arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose work was already banned by Goebbels as allegedly degenerate music.
Reinhardt also founded the highly influential drama schools Hochschule für Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch" in Berlin, Max Reinhardt Seminar, the Max Reinhardt Workshop (Sunset Boulevard), and the Max Reinhardt Junior Workshop. Even though Reinhardt did not live long enough to witness the end of Nazism in 1945, his formerly expropriated estate at Schloss Leopoldskron near Salzburg was restored to his widow and his legacy continues to be celebrated and honoured in the modern Germanosphere for his many radically innovative contributions to the performing arts.
Reinhardt was born Maximilian Goldmann in the spa town of Baden bei Wien, to Jewish parents Rachel Lea Rosi "Rosa" Goldmann and her husband Wilhelm Goldmann, a merchant from Stupava, Slovakia. Having finished school, he began an apprenticeship at a bank, but already took acting lessons.
In 1890, he gave his debut on a private stage in Vienna with the stage name Max Reinhardt (possibly after the protagonist Reinhard Werner in Theodor Storm's novella Immensee). In 1893 he performed at the re-opened Salzburg City Theatre. One year later, Reinhardt relocated to Germany, joining the Deutsches Theater ensemble under director Otto Brahm in Berlin.
Reinhardt was one of the contributors to the Swedish avant-garde theatre magazine Thalia between 1910 and 1913. In 1918 Reinhardt purchased Schloss Leopoldskron castle in Salzburg.
In October 1922 Reinhardt was in the audience when The Dybbuk was staged by the Vilna Troupe at the Roland Theater in Vienna. Reinhardt rushed backstage and congratulated the actors. At the time he was already recognized in Austria as distinguished theater director. A couple of months before his endorsement for The Dybbuk, Reinhardt had again successfully staged Jedermann (Everyman) for the Salzburg Festival.
Reinhardt fled due to the Nazis' increasing anti-Semitic aggressions. The castle was seized following Germany's Anschluss annexation of Austria in 1938. After the war, the castle was restored to Reinhardt's heirs, and subsequently the home and grounds became famous as the filming site for the early scenes of the Von Trapp family gardens in the movie The Sound of Music.
In 1901, Reinhardt together with Friedrich Kayßler and several other theatre colleagues founded the Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke) Kabarett stage in Berlin. Re-opened as Kleines Theater (Little Theatre) it was the first of numerous stages where Reinhardt worked as a director until the beginning of Nazi rule in 1933. From 1903 to 1905, he managed the Neues Theater (present-day Theater am Schiffbauerdamm) and in 1906 acquired the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In 1911, he premiered with Karl Vollmöller's The Miracle in Olympia, London, gaining an international reputation.
In 1910, Siegfried Jacobsohn wrote his book entitled Max Reinhardt. In 1914, he was persuaded to sign the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, defending the German invasion of Belgium. He was signatory 66; he later expressed regret at signing.
From 1915 to 1918, Reinhardt also worked as director of the Volksbühne theatre.
On 23 December 1917, Reinhardt presided over the world premiere of Reinhard Sorge's Kleist Prize-winning stage play Der Bettler, which had long been, "a succès de scandale, an innovation, changing the course of theatrical history with its revolutionary staging techniques".
According to Michael Paterson, "The genius of the 20-year old Sorge already showed the possibilities of abstract staging, and Reinhardt in 1917, simply by following Sorge's stage directions, was to become the first director to present a play in wholly Expressionist style."
According to Michael Paterson, "The play opens with an ingenious inversion: the Poet and Friend converse in front of a closed curtain, behind which voices can be heard. It appears that we, the audience, are backstage and the voices are those of the imagined audience out front. It is a simple, but disorienting trick of stagecraft, whose imaginative spatial reversal is self-consciously theatrical. So the audience is alerted to the fact that they are about to see a play and not a 'slice of life'."
According to Walter H. Sokel, "The lighting apparatus behaves like the mind. It drowns in darkness what it wishes to forget and bathes in light what it wishes to recall. Thus the entire stage becomes a universe of [the] mind, and the individual scenes are not replicas of three-dimensional physical reality, but visualizes stages of thought."
Reinhardt's production of the play, which he had meticulously planned ever since he had purchased the rights from Sorge in 1913, proved enormously popular and productions immediately began to be staged in other German cities, such as Cologne. After the 1918 Armistice, newspapers in the German language in the United States also published articles highly praising Reinhardt's production of the play, which singlehandedly gave birth to Expressionism in the theatre.