MAX REINHARDT

Max Reinhardt was a theatre director who ran eleven stages in Berlin, and is remembered chiefly for a play given once a year in a square in Salzburg. On 22 August 1920 he staged Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann on the Domplatz, in front of the cathedral, and the Salzburg Festival dates its birth from that afternoon. The play has been given there almost every summer since.

He was born Maximilian Goldmann at Baden, near Vienna, in 1873, took the stage name he kept in 1890, and played at the reopened city theatre in Salzburg in 1893. A year later he went to Berlin, to the Deutsches Theater under Otto Brahm. In 1901 he and his colleagues opened a cabaret, Schall und Rauch, the first of many stages he directed; in 1906 he acquired the Deutsches Theater itself. The Miracle, which he staged at Olympia in London in 1911, made his name abroad. By 1930 he had eleven stages in Berlin, and from 1924 to 1933 he also managed the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna.

The festival was not his idea alone. Salzburg had held Mozart festivals now and then since 1877, and in 1917 a society was formed in Vienna to raise money for a festival house. Reinhardt submitted a memorandum that year for a festival house at Hellbrunn; in 1918 he bought the palace of Leopoldskron, and in 1919 Hofmannsthal published a draft programme. With Richard Strauss, the conductor Franz Schalk and the designer Alfred Roller, they are counted its founders. What Reinhardt brought was a theatre man’s idea of a festival, and the artists to fill it. He wrote in 1918 that the “festive, holiday-like” quality theatre had had among the Greeks and in the medieval church “has to be given back to theatre”, and in 1935 that “in the big city we cannot celebrate true festivities with the heart.”

Jedermann itself was a stopgap. The work commissioned for the opening was not ready, and there was not enough timber in post-war Austria to build stands in the riding school. So Reinhardt used what Salzburg had: the square, the cathedral front and the mountains behind. Alexander Moissi played the rich man. The cries of “Jedermann” that summon him to his death come from four men set about the square, one in the tower of the Franciscan church, two in the cathedral arches and one on the hill towards the fortress, and the play is still given in the late afternoon, as Reinhardt timed it, when the square is in sunlight and the shadows lengthen towards the end. He directed it in most summers until the Anschluss. The first opera, Don Giovanni, followed in 1922, conducted by Strauss.

The festival has drawn criticism as well as pilgrims, and its own history gives the critics room. It has been called “an anti-modern product of modernity”, a festival of tradition, Catholic piety and Austrian identity made in reaction to the big city and the new age. The answer, made in the festival’s own pages, is that the tension between old and new has driven it for a century, and that it was meant from the first as a European project, bringing the wider world into a small city.

After the Anschluss in 1938 Reinhardt went into exile, first to Britain and then to the United States, and Jedermann was banned. Leopoldskron was seized. He had already worked in America, where he directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a film in 1935, and in Hollywood he opened a school of theatre; the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, an acting school, was set up on his ideas and carries his name. He died in New York in 1943. Jedermann was back on the Domplatz by 1947, and Leopoldskron, returned to his heirs, is a hotel now.

He matters to the summer season because he settled what a festival is: a small city, a fixed season, and theatre made for one place. The festivals that sit beside Salzburg in the calendar keep that form: Bayreuth, which Hofmannsthal named as the model to answer, since 1876; Edinburgh since 1947; Aix since 1948. In 2026 Jedermann was played on the square only eight times out of fifteen; in rain it moves indoors, and loses the cathedral, the mountains and the light.