Max Reinhardt

MAX REINHARDT was an Austrian director and producer. He was an innovator and experimentor with both space and stage techniques and was one of the first directors to develop repertory companies. 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, became director of the Kleines Theatre and the Neues Theatre where his notable productions included a spectacular staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1905. Around this time he founded an acting school in Berlin and also became the owner of the Deutsches Theater, the state theater of Germany; this remained his home base for thirty years. Reinhardt's productions include an estimated twenty-five hundred performances of Shakespeare plays and another twelve hundred of works by Shaw; he is also credited with staging the first performances of Richard Strauss's celebrated operas Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). Rosalinda, an American adaptation of his production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, opened in New York to favorable reviews not long before Reinhardt's death, but he had no hand in it; the adaptation was prepared by his son Gottfried Reinhardt, who became a noted director. Reinhardt was working on an anticipated revival of Offenbach's operetta Helen Goes to Troy at the time of his death in New York City in 1943 following a stroke.