Hans Rott

Hans Rott’s story is one of music history’s great tragedies. Born in Vienna on August 1, 1858, he was the son of the actor Carl Mathias Rott, who died in 1876 after a stage accident. Rott entered the Vienna Conservatory in 1874, where he studied organ with Anton Bruckner and became a close friend of Gustav Mahler, who was two years his junior; for a time the two even shared lodgings.

Bruckner recognized extraordinary talent in his young student and spoke of him in glowing terms. But Vienna’s musical establishment, dominated by the conservative faction around Johannes Brahms, was hostile to Bruckner and his circle. When Rott showed his completed symphony to Brahms in 1880, hoping to secure support, Brahms allegedly told him that he had no talent; by one account he found in the score “so much that is trivial or nonsensical alongside such beauty.”

The rejection shattered Rott. Later in 1880, during a train journey, he suffered a complete mental breakdown, allegedly threatening a fellow passenger with a revolver and claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1881 and never recovered. He died of tuberculosis on June 25, 1884, aged just twenty-five. Bruckner and Mahler attended his funeral.

Mahler never forgot his friend. “He is so closely related to what is most essential in me,” he said, “that he and I seem like two fruits of the same tree.” He called Rott “the founder of the new symphony, as I understand it,” and echoes of Rott’s scherzo can be heard in the second movement of Mahler’s own First Symphony.