Strnad, Oskar

(1879-1935)

   Designer. Strnad was an accomplished architect and teacher of design. His most important work as a stage designer took place between 1919 and 1933. Beginning in 1919, Strnad designed several productions both in Berlin and for the Volkstheater in his native Vienna; he came into critical prominence with his design for the Berlin Volksbühne production of Walter Hasenclever's Antigone. In 1924 he began working intensively, and almost exclusively, with Max Reinhardt. At the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, at the Salzburg Festival, and at Vienna's Theater in der Josephstadt, Strnad completed more than 50 designs for Reinhardt, including Shaw's St. Joan with Elisabeth Bergner and Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) with Gustaf Gründgens. Strnad's most famous designs for Reinhardt were for the Karl Vollmöller spectacle Das Mirakel (The Miracle), which earned Reinhardt millions of dollars on tour throughout Europe and in the United States. Though the design for The Miracle was spectacular in the extreme, Strnad's designs rarely emphasized the atmospheric; they tended to concentrate instead on what he called the "rhythmics" of plays. Such conceptions likewise lay behind his work as an architect in Vienna, where he continued to work as a teacher at the Kunstgewerbeschule throughout his career with Reinhardt.