The Theatre: Reinhardt’s Salzburg

Midsummer Night’s Dream. Again Salzburg buzzed. This happens every year in August. It is then that the better hotels bestir themselves to show celebrated visitors* to the rooms reserved months in advance. It is then that wretched hostelries truss up dilapidated chambers for the heedless hundreds who have arrived without provision. It is the season of the world-famed Festival, when Max Reinhardt†produces old plays in a manner always unique. The one thing visitors can be reasonably sure of in these Festivals is that they will start with a play related in some way to religion, in accordance with the ecclesiastical traditions of the town. This year, at last, it was Everyman, the morality in which God, in a wig, does lusty battle against Satan for the soul of Man, before the ancient doors of the Salzburg Cathedral.

Then came Herr Reinhardt’s annual surprise, incorporated in a good old reliable Shakesperean comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Accustomed theatregoers must have gasped when they saw the stage. He had audaciously scrapped the usual Greek setting. Costumed in rococo gowns of an early Italian period, the actors scampered over a circular, sloping stage, before a seemingly infinite column of stairs. Draperies hung in a background clustered with stars were melted by green and orange lights into an elfin heaven. Puck, anointing the wrong lovers with his impish love-dew, flew on and off from so many different levels as to leave the impression that there was no such mortal foolishness as the law of gravity.

The cast was an equally daring move. Only one of the principal female characters was interpreted by an actress who had had speaking experience on the stage. The role of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, was entrusted to a young foreign woman—Rosamond Pinchot of the U. S. As the nun in The Miracle she had won recognition as a pantomimist. Now she was called upon to speak for the first time in her career—and in a strange tongue before foreigners. Cast with her were such clearly Teutonic actresses as Katta Sterna (Puck), Maria Solveg (Titania), Tillie Losch (First Elf), Christa Tordy (Helena). Miss Pinchot never once stuttered.

This play, according to cables from Austria, will be presented in Manhattan next month when Max Reinhardt, under management of Gilbert Miller of the Frohman Company (theatrical producers), brings his entire Salzburg Company to the U. S.* Other likely plays: Dante’s Death, Love and Intrigue, A Servant of Two Masters.

The City. Few towns have greater wealth of story than Salzburg. There, Marcus Aurelius, soldier, established Roman headquarters among the Teuton tribes and brooded on philosophy. There Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born to music. There the ecclesiastical princes came nearest to realizing the medieval dream of an all-powerful church and a beautiful state.

Two great hills shut in the city. On one spreads a castle fortress built during the Middle Ages. When the sun sets sombre behind it, a trumpet from the far crenelated wall sounds the night watch. The other hill is the Caperzinergerg (Hill of the Capuchin monks), up which winds a long, wide walk lined with shrines of the saints. Nearby lie salt mines, from which the town takes it name.

Centuries ago the princely archbishops of Falzburg, all-powerful in the city, gave welcome to the drama as a religious agent. They presented the pageant of Saints in Splendor, the drama of God and Satan warring for the soul of Man.

Max Reinhardt has taken in too many thousands of dollars in the show business to fall under suspicion as a disgruntled producer turned “arty.” He has staged morality plays in gay Vienna in such a way that competing bedroom farces and Parisian revues forthwith perished of box-office anemia. But he realizes (as did Richard Wagner) that there is a distinction between the commercial theatre and the art theatre. Both are forms of entertainment, but one provides the audience effortless amusement; the other demands an audience of willing imagination. Reinhardt has surrendered the masses to the movies and incorporated producers. He invites the theatrically devoted to visit his theatre in a spirit of pilgrimage.

So many accept his invitations and are so graciously rewarded, that Salzburg, once the home of monks and archbishops, is now the capital of Drama, and Max Reinhardt, its first citizen, lives in Leopoldskrom, formerly the palace of the Princes.

His Beginning. At 26 he began as an actor of elderly character roles. Otto Brahm, Berlin impressario, offered the youth a brilliant opportunity to play in the German capital. When the time drew near for him to leave, Reinhardt regretted his acceptance, begged to be excused from the enticements of “an uncertain career” in the great city. But Herr Brahm stood adamant on his contract rights and the young man was obliged to break away from his enchanted Salzburg.

Small in stature, dark in complexion, he is—but for one feature —undistinguished in appearance. The notable feature is a high nose which starts outward and upward from his face imperiously, as if pronouncing destiny upon all it surveys.

In a sense he is Destiny in his world. A forest to him is a stage setting; a beggar in the street, an actor; an inflection in his neighbor’s voice, a situation; a church service, pantomime. He transports them all through his mind to their fate on the stage, where he orders them as he thinks they should be ordered. Staging Everyman before the ancient portals of the Salzburg cathedral, he might be seen posting the saints, instructing the angels, calling up to the high tower whence emanates the voice of Deity, “Speak louder, God!”

Reinhardt v. Kaiser. The year of Reinhardt’s arrival in Berlin was a period of intense realism in the Teutonic theatre, when every dunghill and sweat bead in the dialogue found its concrete embodiment on the stage. His Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, would have it so, having set his imperial face against the art of Painter Lieberman, Poet Hauptmann, Composer Richard Strauss, all of whom found life so harsh as to require art’s illusion to make it bearable.

If the Kaiser was vexed by these, he must have been tormented by Reinhardt. In 1905, that rebel produced the Shakespearean comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with such unorthodox stage effects and such wealth of sensuous detail that Berlin, which had always venerated Shakespeare as if he were a text book behind footlights, promptly forsook the dreary house of naturalism to flock to Reinhardt’s palace of fancy. The Kaiser forbade his court to be seen there. The Crown Prince, however, was smuggled into a box at dress rehearsal; noble faces identified with the Court of Potsdam peered up in disguise from the orchestra. Let the Kaiser frown black as he would, the spell of “Potsdamnation” had been thrown off the German theatre.

Stage Director. Many people fail to differentiate between drama and theatre. Drama refers to the conflict of emotions on the stage. Theatre refers to the symphony of mood established between the emotions on the stage and the emotions in the audience. This is the province of the stage director.

Realizing this, one understands more easily why Reinhardt insisted upon the Kammerspiel (an intimate theatre accommodating only 300) for comedy, why he stages his morality plays in public squares, his spectacles in vast theatres seating 5,000; why his production of Greek tragedy centres its action in the midst of the audience; why he will transform an entire theatre into a huge cathedral and incorporate the onlookers into his crowd scheme; why he would establish a dramatic holyland for special audiences. The business of the stage director is concerned with both sides of the footlights. It means creating a mood.

It is a highly technical art, calling for ingenuity, executive ability. An example of its problems: In Goethe’s Faust, the script demands a seemingly impracticable succession of scenes depicting Faust on the road to Hell. The dilemma: if the scenes are cut, the play loses meaning; if the scenery is struck during the performance, the tempo essential to the mood of the theatre is butchered. Shrewd Reinhardt devised a revolving stage on which all the scenes are ready hung, are wheeled before the audience with only flickering interruptions.

Most of his attention in rehearsal is centred upon the actors. His coaching has developed many a famous artist.* Although he encourages them in their own interpretations, so artfully does he point the mood and action of the stage that a sensitive player generally finds himself voluntarily following the suggestions made to him during consultations preceding the rehearsal.

*Among them were: Ferenc Molnar (play-wright), Dario Rappaport (Manhattan portraitist), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (playwright), Richard Strauss (composer), Ruth Draper (monologist), Ina Claire (actress), Mr. Walter Rosen, James Speyer (U. S. financiers).

†Note the spelling—R-E-I-N-H-A-R-D-T— same as Sylvan Louis (“Spider”) Reinhardt onetime (1919) Yale football end and now husband of Elaine Rosenthal Reinhardt one-time (1915-1918-1925) Western Women’s Golf Champion. Not same as Novelist Mary Robert RINEHART. Other spellings: Reinhart, Reinhard, Rehinhardt, Rhihhart, Rhinehardt.

*In the company are: Helen, Herman & Hans Thimig (dubbed the German Barrymores) ; Moissi; Lili Darvas (wife of Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar); Sokoloff; Hans Moser; Rosamond Pinchot.

*Some of them: Tilla Durieux, Elsie Hemis, Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph & Rudolph Schild-kraut.