Hans Rott (1858-1884). Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
October 1880, a train bound for Alsace. A twenty-two-year-old Viennese pulls out a revolver and aims it at another passenger who is about to light a cigar. He mustn’t, he explains with perfect calm: Johannes Brahms has packed the train with dynamite. The young man is called Hans Rott. He is committed to the Lower Austrian asylum, and he will die there four years later, of tuberculosis, at twenty-five.
To understand how anyone ends up in that carriage, you have to go back a few months. Rott was the brightest talent at the Vienna Conservatory: Anton Bruckner’s favourite organist, roommate and friend of another student named Gustav Mahler. At twenty he had finished a Symphony in E major, his first, and in September 1880 he took it around to the competitions and the powerful, looking for a grant and a performance. He went to Brahms too, the arbiter of Viennese musical life. The accounts agree on the substance of the meeting: Brahms told him there was nothing of his own in the symphony, and that he had better give up music. For a poor young man, recently orphaned of both parents, who had hung everything on music, that sentence was a diagnosis. A few weeks later came the train, the revolver, the imaginary dynamite: persecution turned into delirium, with the persecutor’s name in plain sight. The case even ended up in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which devoted a study to it.
The symphony stayed in a drawer for one hundred and nine years. When it was finally performed, in Cincinnati in 1989, the audience heard something hard to believe: themes, orchestral colours, even a whole way of building a scherzo that the world had learned to call Mahlerian. It was not imitation: it came first. Mahler, who knew that score well, had written it without mincing words: the founder of the new symphony as I understand it is Rott, and what music lost with him is immeasurable. The two of them, he said, were fruits ripened on the same tree.
It would be easy to make Brahms the villain of the fable, and the legend does exactly that: it is even said that over the years he became the monster of the rumour mill, the man who pushed young people to suicide. The documents say something more precise and more useful: they say that the judgement of a very powerful man, delivered carelessly to a fragile person, can carry the same force as a physical fact. Nobody will ever put a bad review on trial. But every time an audition or a competition decides a life, there is also, in that room, the gentle ghost of Hans Rott, asking only to have his symphony heard again. Today it exists in several recordings, and it is worth the journey: it is Mahler’s music before Mahler, written by a young man who ran out of time.