Er war auf dem Weg zum Jahrhundert-Musiker, doch er starb einsam mit 26
Michael Maier
Berliner Zeitung
11.02.26
He was on his way to becoming a musician of the century, but he died alone at 26.
Paavo Järvi and the Berlin Philharmonic pay tribute to Hans Rott. His life was tragic. After his death, Gustav Mahler discovered him. But it was too late.
One of the most important composers in music history remains largely unknown: Hans Rott left posterity a single work that would influence the course of musical development like almost no other composition. The Berlin Philharmonic under Paavo Järvi is performing Rott's First Symphony in E major these days. The timing couldn't be better: In January, the Philharmonic, under Kirill Petrenko, celebrated Gustav Mahler's monumental Eighth Symphony with spectacular success.
"Mahler is inconceivable without Rott," Järvi told the Berliner Zeitung. "There are many composers who improve this or that, who introduce innovations in the details. But very few point the way forward in a completely new direction." He explained that symphonic music had reached a formal limit with Brahms and Bruckner. Only Mahler expanded the form to such an extent that it could be adapted and further developed by modern composers.
This breakthrough would not have been possible without Hans Rott, now largely forgotten. Mahler was a friend of Rott. He and Hugo Wolf often met at Rott's apartment in Vienna. Rott was considered Anton Bruckner's favorite student: "Rott learned everything from Bruckner; the First Symphony, which he wrote as a very young man, is an extraordinary work," Järvi said. This applies to his inventiveness, the completely new soundscapes, and the masterful orchestration: "Rott opened the door to another world," Järvi concluded.
... But it wasn't Hans Rott himself who ultimately walked through that door. The young, highly moral man died at the age of 26 under tragic circumstances. Rott was born in Vienna in 1858, the illegitimate son of the actor and singing comedian Carl Mathias Rott and the singer and actress Maria Rosalia Lutz. After his parents' marriage, he was legitimized by his father in 1863. His parents died young, and throughout his life he remained deeply attached to the memory of his mother.
He studied piano with Leopold Landskron, organ with Anton Bruckner, harmony with Hermann Grädener, and composition with Gustav Mahler under Franz Krenn at the Vienna Conservatory of the Society of Friends of Music. Rott had difficulty finding suitable work. Bruckner's efforts to place the brilliant organist in St. Florian or Klosterneuburg were unsuccessful. Even his brilliant symphony initially met with no success. Johannes Brahms, who, as Järvi recounts, was "a rough character who even turned away Jean Sibelius," spoke disparagingly of the work in September 1880 as a member of the board of trustees for the "state scholarship" that Rott had sought. Brahms said that, besides "so beautiful" passages, the work contained much that was "trivial and nonsensical," which is why it could not have been composed by Rott. A performance of the symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic, with the court opera conductor Hans Richter, who was interested in the work, also failed to materialize.
Rott had previously taken a position with the Piarists in Vienna, but hated the routine of church music and resigned. He desperately wanted to stay in Vienna, but then fell in love and, in order to one day support his beloved, was prepared to accept the position of choirmaster in Mulhouse in distant Alsace. He agonized over the decision, finally embarked on the journey, and it sealed his fate. He never saw his destination.
During a stopover in Linz, he heard knocking on the walls of his room. As the journey continued, he suddenly attacked a fellow passenger lighting a cigar, brandishing a pistol. Rott believed the train car had been filled with dynamite on the orders of Johannes Brahms, intending to kill him. Shortly before reaching the Simbach border station, he was forced to leave the train, "apparently already under supervision," according to Uwe Harten's records. He was admitted to the psychiatric clinic of the Vienna General Hospital in a "completely confused state." After a first suicide attempt, he was transferred in 1881 to the Lower Austrian State Asylum in Vienna. The diagnosis: "madness, hallucinatory delusions of persecution."
At that time, this diagnosis was a kind of death sentence, as medicine offered no treatment. Rott spent the last years of his life in the institution, mostly mentally absent. The fact that he was eventually granted the state scholarship he had so hoped for was of no consequence to Rott while he was in the institution.
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