As a boy and young man, one of Wilder’s great enthusiasms was collecting German theatrical data. This passion for German theater and knowledge of the German language precipitated his intimate acquaintance with the names and production histories of the leading German-speaking theaters, directors, and actors of the period. Among these names, Wilder likely encountered Viennese actor and playwright, Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) and the world-famous Austrian-born director and educator Max Reinhardt (1873–1943). These two figures would have a profound influence on the development of The Matchmaker. It is more than likely that young Wilder, who loved records and statistics, read the first influential study of Reinhardt published in this country in English, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (1914), and came across a summary of Reinhardt’s productions between 1903 and 1910 in the Appendix. There, on page 319, he would have discovered the name of the Nestroy play Reinhardt had mounted in 1904 at the Neues Theatre in Berlin: Einen Jux will er sich machen. Nestroy’s satires were indelibly associated with Vienna’s stage productions and argot but his work was still all but unknown in the United States in the 1930s.

Wilder sought Reinhardt out for the first time as early as 1923, at a theater in Philadelphia, and noted the meeting in a letter home with prophetic understatement. “A most valuable connection when I get back to playwriting,” he wrote, in reference not only to the encounter but also to his first and deepest love, which he had put aside during this period to write fiction. Fittingly, his 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination demonstrated his interest in farce in prose terms. As he wrote in April 1934 to that novel’s distinguished German translator, Herbert E. Herlitschka (one of Nestroy’s fellow Austrians): “[Ferdinand] Raimund and Nestroy have become my great enthusiasm during the last two years and I should like to think that my book (though so far short of those in literary merit) should nevertheless breathe that loving saturation in the detailed atmosphere of a district that is one of the great qualities of Einen Jux will er sich machen. . . .”

At last, Wilder was ready to attempt the play for which he had been preparing for years. He began writing his full-length farce in the summer of 1935. As he wrote to his friend, the actress Ruth Gordon, in April 1936: “I’ve been reading all the great ‘formal’ comedies in every language: Molière and Goldoni, and Lessing—just to make sure that I’ve expunged every lurking vestige of what Sam Behrman and George S. Kaufman think comedy is.” The play-in-progress was The Merchant of Yonkers, a farce appropriately listed in Wilder’s records of this period as “Merchant of Yonkers (Nestroy-Molière).” And from the beginning, it is clear that he wanted Reinhardt to direct it. The dream was hardly far-fetched; in the fall of 1934, the two men had had long talks in Chicago (probably while Reinhardt was directing Midsummer Night’s Dream), at the end of which, as Wilder informed his family, “with one hand on my shoulder [he] asked me to write a play for him. That was all; but I walked on air.”