the unifying element was the wide-spread feeling for dramatic performance and the universal ear for music. Everyone was able to enjoy and to judge the finest subtleties of the actor's art, and this is as true of the heroic style as of low characterizations or burlesque. In the same way it was perfectly natural for everyone to repeat the melody of an aria or dance out the rhythm of a waltz. All interest in the theatrical fare centred in the actor, the singer, or the danseuse; thus, King Lear or Faust was reached through the actor, Don Juan through melody and the singer, and pantomime through Fanny Elssler, Taglioni, or, in our own generation, Wiesenthal. Consequently the theatre in Vienna, as is still the case in Paris, had been a matter of general public concern for three hundred years or more—for as a matter of fact the theatre of the Middle Ages, with its burlesque interludes and its imposing musical moments, passes directly into the opera of the seventeenth century and the popular theatre of the eighteenth. In England it has ceased to fulfil this function since the days of James I, and in America it never began. In either case it is fundamentally a question of religion. (I refer to the basically divergent conceptions of the theatre as an institution, starting from either Roman Catholicism or Puritanism.)
Perhaps such a representative personality as Maria Jeritza, whose acting and singing captivated the New York public in one season, or even on her first appearance, can best illustrate what I mean when I designate the performer, the mimic element, as the essential of our theatre. No one better suits this atmosphere than Max Reinhardt, and it is high time that he returned here. I say returned because Vienna is both the city of his birth and the root of his work, even though he has spent fifteen or twenty years—he is now forty-eight—directing the leading theatres of Berlin, and has been more active in nearly all the rest of Europe than in Vienna. He belongs to those rarest of figures, the truly creative theatrical directors. And one could almost count the men of his calibre on the fingers of one hand, taking into consideration all countries of Europe and the span of a century. For our own period he has been linked with Antoine, the creator of the théâtre libre, and with Stanislawski, the founder and incomparable manager of the Moscow Art Theatre. These are perhaps the three names which deserve most to be engraved in golden letters on the honour roll of the modern European theatre. At some distance one might also include the name of Diaghilev, who made the Russian Ballet what it meant to Europe over a period of ten
