"A musician of genius ... who died unrecognized and
in want on the very threshold of his career. ... What music has lost in him
cannot be estimated. Such is the height to which his genius soars in ... [his]
Symphony [in E major], which he wrote as 20-year-old youth and makes him ...
the Founder of the New Symphony as I see it. To be sure, what he wanted is not
quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my
inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which
the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant
infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted
the content of new time which was breaking out for music." Gustav Mahler on
Hans Rott.
Hans Rott ( August 1 1858 – June 25 1884) was an Austrian composer and
organist. His music is little-known today, though he received high praise in
his time from Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner. He left a symphony and Lieder,
among other works.
Rott was born in
Braunhirschengrund, a suburb of Vienna. His mother Maria Rosalia (1840–1872,
maiden name Lutz) was an actress and singer. His father Carl Mathias Rott (real
name Roth, born 1807, married 1862) was a famous comic actor in Vienna who was
crippled in 1874 by a stage accident which led to his death two years later.
Rott began to evidence
persecutory delusions. In October 1880, while on a train journey, he reportedly
threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled
the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881, where
despite a brief recovery he sank into depression. By the end of 1883 a
diagnosis recorded "hallucinatory insanity, persecution mania—recovery no
longer to be expected." He died of tuberculosis in 1884, aged 25. Many
well-wishers, including Bruckner and Mahler, attended Rott's funeral at the
Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.
Some of his music manuscripts have
survived in the music collection of Vienna's national library. This includes
Rott's Symphony in E major, and sketches for a second Symphony that was never
finished. The completed symphony is remarkable in the way it anticipates some
of Mahler's musical characteristics. In particular, the third movement
prefigures the second movement of Mahler's First Symphony. In his last years, Rott wrote a lot of music,
only to destroy what he wrote soon after writing it, saying it was worthless. Other
recordings of the symphony have since been issued, and other Rott works have
been occasionally revived, including his Julius Caesar Overture, Pastoral
Overture and Prelude for Orchestra.