Robert, a fiery Hungarian actor, was practically retrained by Adolf Wilbrandt (see below) specifically for this role.  The premiere performance on December 29, 1886 was a sensational success.  Ludwig Speidel, the influential critic of the liberal newspaper Die Neue Freie Presse(Freud's own favorite), declared that this production of Oedipus Rexproved that Vienna was now of age for grand tragedy.  It is not known for certain that Freud saw this production, but it is certain that he would have known about it and would have had ample opportunity to see it between 1886 and 1899.  It premiered a few months after his return to Vienna from Paris, where he had seen the Comédie Française production that made a deep impression on him.  So it is reasonable to think that the success of this Viennese production would have attracted his attention.

Robert could never compete with Mounet-Sully's international reputation for the role, but like his French counterpart, he was a great Selbstspieler.  Hermann Bahr said of him:
 

Through all the forms he took on, the black flame of his being penetrated; through all the words which he spoke, his extraordinary sound—so alien, so strange, so otherworldly—broke through.  He played only himself; he always expressed only himself.  (Cited in Kindermann 7:189)

Born in Rostock, Germany, Wilbrandt came to Vienna after working as a journalist for Pan-Germanist newspapers in Munich.  In the 1870s he became famous in Vienna for historical dramas and comedies before becoming director of the Burgtheater 1881-1887.

Wilbrandt had translated Oedipus Rex along with other works of Sophocles back in 1865-66, with the specific goal of making these works viable on the modern stage.  His translations were performed in Germany in Meiningen, Darmstadt, Berlin, and Munich, but he had little directorial influence in those productions.  As director of the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1882-1888, Wilbrandt produced Sophocles' Elektra, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus in Colonus, along with the satyr play The Cyclopsby Euripides.  These were milestones in the process of making Greek drama a vital presence on the modern German stage.

 

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this theater in Viennese culture.  A converted tenniscourt, it served as the court theater beginning in 1741 and was established as a national theater in 1776 by Emperor Joseph II.  Its peculiar dimensions led to the development of a unique conversational acting style much different from the declamatory tendencies of other 19th-century theater companies, and by Wilbrandt's time it was indisputably the greatest German-speaking stage in the world, of a stature equal to the Comédie Française.

Wilbrandt was director during the last years of this building's operation (1881-1887).  When the Burgtheater company was moved to its new home on the Ringstrasse in 1888, it became apparent that the new building, though exquisitely beautiful (including ceiling frescoes by the Klimt brothers), had numerous structural flaws and few of the virtues of the old theater; a considerable scandal ensued.  This is one reason why Wilbrandt's directorship was later remembered in the most glowing terms by the Viennese public, whose members at that time included Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the rest of the "Jung Wien" generation.  Hofmannsthal would later make his own translations of Sophocles Elektra(made into an opera by Richard Strauss) and Oedipus Rex(produced in novel fashion and with great success by Max Reinhardt).  Thus the revitalization of Sophocles on the German stage can be traced back directly to Adolf Wilbrandt and his direction of the Burgtheater.

In the 1870s, Wilbrandt made a name for himself in Vienna as the author of light comedies and toga-dramas, like this play about the brothers Gracchus, for which he won the Grillparzer prize.  He also wrote Arria und Messalina, about the Emperor Claudius' notorious wife, and Nero, a lengthy MacBeth-style tragedy based on the life of the Roman emperor.  In addition, he had translated Shakespeare's Roman drama, Coriolanus.  Wilbrandt came to know all the Burgtheater actors well while still a playwright, and later in the 1880s stepped up to direct the theater as its first "poet-director."

As a young man about to enter the university in 1873, Freud saw Gracchus, der Volkstribunat the Burgtheater, and wrote of it to a friend:
 

The Caius Gracchus is by Wilbrandt; he has a mother, Cornelia, and a wife, Licinia, who do not leave him alone for one minute, because they fear his childish pranks.  He speaks most eloquently though I doubt he knows his own mind, and finally dies on the aventine, abandoned by all save Cornelia and Licinia.  His death is so boring that not even the worst oligarch would claim he deserved it.  Licinia...was played by Fräulein Precheisen, a tall beauty with fair hair, who must have a heart of stone, for, try though she might, she could manage neither tears nor raptures.  The ability to say or shout "dead" is not part of her repertoire, an advantage that unfortunately she displayed brilliantly...  She ought to take care not to recite her own obituary, lest all the mourners burst into fits of laughter.  (Boerlich 30-31)
 

After resigning as director of the Burgtheater, Wilbrandt wrote what is now his best known—and perhaps his only known—work: Der Meister von Palmyra, a work also known to Freud and praised highly by one of Freud's favorite authors:  Mark Twain.   For this work, he won the Grillparzer prize for an unprecedented second time.

No images survive of the set from Wilbrandt's Vienna production of Oedipus, but reviewers noted the use of white Greek buildings (instead of polychrome ones in keeping with contemporary scholarship) and a somewhat irksome statue of Apollo.  This is in keeping with other such productions in Germany, where more pains were taken to represent Greek buildings with historically accurate detail than were taken to observe the conventions of ancient Greek drama.  One can see in this particular image a Winckelmannian flourish in the many statues present, setting the tone of "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur."   By the turn of the next century, however, Oedipus would be staged with anything but that, particularly by Max Reinhardt.  The shift in production styles reflects the changing interest in the Greek world after Nietzsche demolished the 19th-century's idealized view of Greek civilization.  As discussed in the accompanying article, Reinhardt's modernist production of Oedipusencodes the Freudian interpretation of it via Hofmannsthal's translation.

Wolter played the role with such verve that she managed to make this otherwise doubtful toga-drama a success.  She would later use her same powers to play the role of Sophocles' Elektra for the first time on a modern stage, in a production that was Adolf Wilbrandt's inaugural activity as the director of the Burgtheater.  The importance of this Elektralies in the fact that it was clearly the precursor to Hofmannsthal's own "hysterical" Elektra, later turned into a now-famous opera by Richard Strauss.  Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteriahave long been seen as providing a stimulus to Hofmannsthal's interpretation of the character Elektra, and Freud and the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society debated this use of psychology on the stage in their weekly meeting of May 31, 1909.  Freud pronounced his condemnation of it in no uncertain terms (as reported in the mintues):
 
  ...the art of the poet does not consist of finding and dealing with problems.  That he should leave to the psychologists.  Rather, the poet's art consists of obtaining poetic effects out of such problems; experience shows that these problems must be disguised if they are to produce such effects;  furthermore, that the effect is by no means diminished if one merely suspects what the problems are and none of the readers or listeners can make out clarly what the effect is.  Thus the poet's art consists essentially in covering over.  What is unconscious ought not, without more ado, be rendered conscious; of course it must become conscious to a certain dcegree—that is, to the point at which it still affects us, without our occupying ourselves with it in our conscious thoughts.  At the point where this becomes possible, art leaves off.  We have the right to analyze a poet's work, but it is not right for the poet to make poetry out of our analyses.  (Nunberg and Federn 2:189)  
Freud had not, however, seen Hofmannsthal's Elektra at that time, nor did this theme ever grab his attention as much as Oedipus clearly had from the very beginnings of psychoanalysis.  He resisted attempts to create a complementary "Elektra Complex" for explaining female development.

The Reinhardt production of Hofmannsthal's translation was an international sensation.  Reinhardt experimented with large spaces—including circuses—in order to achieve a new idea of theater intimacy.  Moissi and members of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Berlin came to Vienna in 1911 to perform, among other things, Oedipus Rex in the Zirkus Busch, where Freud saw them.  Reinhardt himself played the role of Tiresias.

The Viennese papers were largely appreciative of the performance, and it was even given the honor of a parody in the Lustspielhaus on the Prater, featuring the characters: Oedipus, "Jokastal," Tiresias "und sein Knäblein Hugo"—an obvious reference to Hofmannsthal.  When Reinhardt's production went to Covent Garden, it provided an enormous stimulus for the performance of Greek drama in Great Britain and helped to end the Censor's ban on Oedipus Rex (MacIntosh 294-301).  Reinhardt's success in London did much more for the cause than the far less spectacular productions mounted by Gilbert Murray and Harley Granville-Barker.

Thus Wilbrandt's 1886 production, which stands behind Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt's, can be said to have contributed substantially if indirectly to the revival of Greek drama on the 20th-century English stage as well as on the German.  In addition, the actor John Martin-Harvey, who played Oedipus in the Covent Garden production, was deeply influenced by Mounet-Sully; so in the British production, both strands of the continental theater tradition came together (MacIntosh 297-301).

This illustration conveys very well the lighting constrasts which Reinhardt used to punctuate the action of the drama, including darkness suggestive of great volumes of space beyond the center stage, and spotlights to highlight the action.  One also sees Oedipus' exit through the audience, violating the traditional articulation of the playing-space.  A number of seats had been removed to allow much of the action to take place on a level with those seated on the floor of the house.  John Martin-Harvey, who played Oedipus in London, recalled seeing audience members avert their gaze from him as he approached them during his exit scene.

Georg Fuchs, director of the  Munich Kunstler Theater at the time, expressed the idea behind this kind of monumental drama thus:  "The monumental drama cannot bear the trappings of the ordinary stage.  It is too big—the usual stage tricks fail absolutely in their effect here.  Audience and actors form one big community."  (vom Baur 58).  In fact, the audience could see all the stage and its properties when they first took their seats; they were left to guess what use each item would have, and were often surprised by Reinhardt's ingenuity.

In comparing the Reinhardt Oedipusto that of Mounet-Sully and the Comédie Française, a reviewer for the London Morning Postwrote:
 

At the Théâtre Français the stage suggests no sense of doom; it is the mere neutral background against which the actors move.  At Covent Garden the theatre is eloquent of doom and destiny.  The heavy black pillars with the massive doors of burnished copper splashed with the blood-red of a sun setting angrily in the west, in full view of the audience from the moment that they enter, the slow extinguishing of lights till the house is darkened, the solemn notes of prelude, and the striking of the bells create an atmostphere for the play of tragic expectancy.  (Morning Post January 16, 1912)

Sensational crowd scenes were a hallmark of the Reinhardt production and were among the techniques utilized to assault the audience's senses.  Their use had little in common with the Greek chorus; in fact, Hofmansthal's translation had seriously cut down the amount of text given to the chorus, as had the translations of Lacroix and Wilbrandt.  Said one reviewer of the London production:  "In the management of his crowds, Professor Reinhardt has cut clean across the established concepts of classical tragedy.  He has put no trust in slow and stately movement as the vehicle for the tragic." (Morning PostJanuary 16, 1912)

A contemporary description gives some sense of the spectacle provided by the production's opening scene:
 

The first surprise in Oedipus was to find oneself in Egyptian darkness, out of which rang, clear and loud, a clarion trumpet-call.  Then four lithe youths, clad in the altogether, and bearing their torches on high, ran out from the centre entrance opposite the stage, up the vast steps, to kindle the calcium lights, resembling ancient altar fires that stand at either side of the palace.  Where and how these youths then disappear, one doesn't notice, as the attention is distracted by a rumbling that is neither thunder nor the rolling of nine-pins!  A rumbling that has too many tones, too many dissonances to be mechanical; louder it grows, nearer it comes, and with it a jostling, seething gray mass of human beings that pours into the arena through three entrances.  Their inarticulate cries and wails grow more intense; pierced here and there by the shrieks of a woman or the groan of a man's voice, they finally concentrate into the insistent demands for 'Oedipus.'  It is the plague-ridden people of Thebes, come to beg for succor at the palace of the King.  Their voices penetrate through the heavy palace walls—Oedipus himself comes out to answer them.  Hand over eyes, he steps out upon the platform before his door and gazes into the darkness of the pit in search of the author of his summons.  Thus they discourse, the King and his people, he in his majesty towering above them, they in their misery standing below.  He promises them aid; they turn and leave him, murmuring encouragement and hope the one and the other; the strong carrying the weak, the less afflicted supporting the dying.  Out of the darkness into which they disappear comes all the ill-fotune that besets Oedipus, bit by bit, until finally, overwhelmed by an accumulation of tragedies, blind, powerless and deserted, he is driven into the darkness himself, followed by the same mob, which dares not even touch him now, for fear of pollution. (vom Baur 58).
 
 

"A wonderful, majestic old man, in flowing white beard and flowing white gown, led through the arena by a mere slip of a graceful lad clad in ancient scantiness, [the scene with Tiresisas] presented a marked contrast in its simplicity and quiet to the stormy scene that had preceded it." (vom Baur 59)  In this photograph, one can see something of the visual rhetoric of an Oedipus high and confident in his power with the others approaching him from below.  Compare the same scene in the production of the Comédie Française.

One can only wonder with whom Freud identified most during this scene, as he was mulling over the brewing tensions between himself and his colleague Alfred Adler.  Early in his career, Freud clearly identified with Oedipus, and said that the play's action is very similar to psychoanalysis, implying that Oedipus is the self-analyst just as Freud himself was.  But  as he grew older and experienced the ambitions and hostilities of his followers, he might well have sympathized with the wise but hampered Tiresias who alone knows that Oedipus is the very culprit he seeks.

Freud's awareness of the Oedipal dynamics of intellectual revolt is clear in a letter written in 1924 to his estranged protegé, Otto Rank, who had begun to move in a new direction with his own theory of birth trauma and its importance in the human psyche.  Freud said:
 

I don't take the difference of opinion concerning the birth trauma seriously. Either you will convince and correct me in the course of time, provided there is still time enough, or you will correct yourself and sift what is a permanent new discovery from what has been added by the bias of the discoverer.  I know that your discovery does not lack applause, but you must remember how few people are capable of passing judgment and how strong in most of them is the desire to get away from the Oedipus whenever there is a chance.  (E. Freud 353)