Hans Rott
Symphony No. 1 in E major

Here, a young man does not hide his light under a bushel. At the age of just 22, Hans Rott sought the spotlight with a symphony of almost an hour in length. Yet the doors of the Vienna Musikverein remained closed to him. The rejection drove him into mental collapse, and in 1884, four years later, he died in the Lower Austrian State Asylum for the Insane. A century on, in the late 1980s, the score of his First Symphony resurfaced in the archives of the Austrian National Library – and the musical world pricked its ears in amazement. Hans Rott’s music echoes Schumann, Wagner, Bruckner – and Gustav Mahler. The similarities are particularly striking in the Scherzo, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the second movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, written eight years later. Does music history need to be rewritten?

Mahler and Rott did indeed study together in Franz Krenn’s composition class; they were friends and exchanged ideas intensively. “He is so closely related to what is most essential in me that he and I seem like two fruits of the same tree,” Mahler is reported to have said, according to his close confidante Nathalie Bauer-Lechner. He described his prematurely deceased friend as “the founder of the new symphony, as I understand it”, before adding: “Yet what he intended has not quite been achieved. It is as though someone were drawing back for the furthest possible throw and, still unskilled, failing to reach the target completely.” Johannes Brahms was more blunt, criticising the score for containing “so much that is trivial or nonsensical alongside such beauty”. Both assessments strike at the heart of the matter: Hans Rott’s symphony could have marked the beginning of a great career. It is the work of an undoubtedly highly gifted beginner, though not a stroke of genius with a defining impact on style. Even so, it adds an interesting facet to Austrian music history at the close of the 19th century.

The opening movement was composed as early as 1878. Shortly after his 20th birthday, Rott submitted it to his conservatoire’s composition competition – and received no prize. The theme is expansive, 28 bars long, hymn-like, full of romantic exuberance. Much that follows is richly decorative, evoking associations with the lavishly ornamented façades of Vienna’s Ringstrasse, then under construction. 

For long stretches, the slow second movement has the character of an organ improvisation: ponderous and darkly grounded, interwoven with Baroque gestures in the manner of Handel. Rott’s composition teacher Hans Krenn wrote almost exclusively sacred music; as an organist, the student was taught by Anton Bruckner, who spoke of Rott in glowing terms. In the closing pages, the music opens out, broadening into a mystical vision of the beyond. The Scherzo, however, is the reason this symphony truly deserves to be heard: here Hans Rott is consistently original, youthful and powerful, with music that sounds astonishingly innovative for the year 1880 – and strikingly Mahlerian, as sardonic ländler collide with graceful waltzes.

As in many of Bruckner’s symphonies, Rott’s finale is the weightiest movement; like his model, he weaves in reminiscences of earlier material. It illustrates just how much the young composer developed during the work’s gestation, how his artistic confidence grew. The finale begins expansively and rhapsodically, freely associative, a collage of ideas. Halfway through, however, Rott falls back into more conventional patterns, grappling laboriously and rather academically with a pathetically pompous march theme. Fortunately, the symphony does not end in bombast, but with a redemptive pianissimo close, aesthetically akin to Wagner’s Parsifal.