Hans Rott
Composer
The Austrian composer Hans Rott was born in Vienna to a theatrical family, and died there at the age of 25, leaving a handful of completed pieces that can only hint at what he might otherwise have achieved. Both his parents died while he was still in his teens, but the orphaned Rott gained a place at the Vienna Conservatoire through his own talents and won high praise from his teachers – including Anton Bruckner, in whose organ class he was an outstanding pupil. Rott attended Wagner's first Bayreuth Festival but despite winning an organist's position at Vienna's Piarist Church, he found life outside the Conservatoire challenging.
Falling foul of Vienna's musical faction-fighting, he succumbed first to mental illness, and then to the respiratory disease that killed him. His completed works include orchestral pieces and songs but his reputation rests almost wholly upon his masterly Symphony in E major (1878), and upon the recollections of his fellow-student and close friend Gustav Mahler, whose own First Symphony plays explicit homage to Rott's, and who wrote that "it is completely impossible to estimate what music has lost in him". Numerous recordings and performances of the Symphony since its belated premiere in 1989 have given modern listeners a chance to judge for themselves.
