Rott, Hans

Hans Rott was the son of the then-famous Viennese actor Karl Matthias Rott , who in 1874, as a result of an accident, was forced to leave the scene and died in 1876. Earlier, in 1872, Rott lost his mother. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory together with Gustav Mahler , with whom Rotta was friends (for some time they even shared a room). Rott's teachers were, in particular, Franz Krenn (composition) and Joseph Dax (piano), however, Rott was most indebted to Anton Bruckner , who studied in the organ class. Bruckner was the only senior musician to appreciate Rott's talent as a composer, organist (especially in Bach’s repertoire) and improviser. Rott was also influenced by the music of Richard Wagner , in 1876 he attended the first Bayreuth festival .

In 1876 - 1878, Rott served as an organist in the Vienna Church of the Order of PRs "Maria Troy", while working on his first symphony. The result of his work he showed Johannes Brahms and Hans Richter , who resolutely rejected the new composition. The complete lack of recognition broke Rott's psyche. In 1880, he left Vienna, receiving the position of the head of the choir in Mulhouse , but on the road he began to threaten a fellow traveler with a cigar smoking a cigarette, explaining that Brahms had put dynamite in the train car. Rott had to return to Vienna, where he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, in which he died four years later from tuberculosis . His later works were not preserved, since he destroyed them almost immediately after writing.

According to Gustav Mahler (in a 1900 letter to Natalia Bauer-Lechner ), “it is impossible to overestimate how much music has lost in him. His genius reaches such heights even in the first symphony, written at the age of 20 and making it, without exaggeration, the founder of a new symphony, as I understand it ” ^[5] .

The compositions left by Rott lay in the archives for about a century, until in the late 1970s, musician Paul Banks, who studied Mahler's work, became interested in them. In 1979, he published his first article on Rott. In 1989, 105 years after the death of the composer, the Rott Symphony in E Major was first performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gerhard Samuel . Subsequently, this composition was performed and recorded by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra with Dennis Russell Davis , the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra with Leif Segerstam , Philharmonia Hungarica with Christoph Kampestrini , the Munich Radio Symphony Orchestra with Sebastian Weigle and several other groups. The overture “Julius Caesar”, Pastoral Overture (Pastoral Prelude), symphony for string orchestra, string quartet were also performed and recorded.

“A missing specialist between Bruckner and Mahler” was called by a modern specialist ^[6] , and another music critic notes: “It is hard to imagine where Hans Rott could have led us if he had lived enough to make his way” ^[7] .

• Hans Rott International Society (German )