max reinhardt

Max Reinhardt can be described as one of the greatest directors in history. A great innovator and a master of spectacle, he staged gigantic productions, full of pageantry and color. Reinhardt became one of the first theatrical directors to achieve widespread recognition as a major creative artist, working in Berlin, Salzburg, New York City, and Hollywood. His work summed up all theater before him and opened new doorways for the theater that followed.

Max Reinhardt was born Max Goldmann on September 9th, 1873 in Baden, near Vienna. He was the oldest of the seven children born to Wilhelm and Rose Goldmann, an Orthodox Jewish couple. With his only brother, Edmund, young Max played long hours with puppets and from their balcony watched the real puppets in the streets. "He was educated at the Untergymnasium, and was in a banking business till seventeen" (Carter 33).

"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" (Britannica). Although he proved to be an inhibited actor,

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who can help him, but that someone is sitting there below who will always be as carried away as the naive public when the actor succeeds" (Sayler 98).

Aside from his performances, one of his most distinguished characteristics was that of his relationship with the actors or actresses in his plays. And out of the raw he weaves a piece of fine tapestry which falls harmoniously within his general design" (Carter 185). They were not considered, in his eyes, to be any less than the main actor. In the same year, upon Brahm's retirement, Reinhardt was chosen to succeed his former mentor as head of the Deutsches Theater. Shortly after his seventieth birthday Reinhardt died of a stroke in New York's Gladstone Hotel. Every person was an individual and was looked at as such. In 1935, with an unlimited budget, he directed a film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream along with a stage version. This reputation, however, could be lost just as quickly when they left him. "Understudies are not treated as mechanical appliances. In 1890 he began his career under the name Max Reinhardt and in 1894 was invited to Berlin by Otto Brahm, director of the Deutsches Theater.

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