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There is one peculiar
mind-set that perhaps manifests itself more clearly
and obviously in Germany than anywhere else in the world.
The minute that something unforeseen or unprecedented
happens consequences of a magnitude having nothing at
all to do with the particular occurrence and its actual
significance have to be thought up. On closer examination
one often enough will come to the conclusion that what
has just been advertised as a big bang was hardly anything
more than a little whimper which will take care of itself
within a short time and without medical attention. A
little time, a little thinking, and the hysterical attack
will subside, provided of course that the cannonade
that has just been fired has not taken its permanent
toll on the birds, butterflies, and flowers.
|
| Toward the
end of the 1980s the musicologist Paul Banks discovered
the score of Hans Rott's Symphony in E major in the archives
of the Austrian National Library. He helped it to earn
attention arousing interest in its performance, saw to
it that it was presented to the public, and thus without
question rendered an important service to the music world.
After all, here a remarkable piece had indeed all of a
sudden resurfaced from the forgotten depths of history,
and it was certainly a work that deserved its hearing
from friends of romantic music. |
| The reactions
in expert circles were astonishing. This creation of a
composer who was just twenty years old when he wrote it
heralded great talent and produced a universal exclamation
of ecstatic transport, for it was evidently here that
the hen that had laid the egg of Columbus had finally
been found. The young Hans Rott was immediately proclaimed
the father of the new symphony, and the great Gustav Mahler,
the contemporary of the future, the trailblazer of the
modern era, proved to be a plagiarist who had without
restraint helped himself to the oeuvre of his fellow student,
who was two years his senior. Inevitably, there were those
who went so far as to suggest that the whole of music
history would have to be rewritten! |
| A few years
have since gone by. The waves have died down. One or the
other expert by now must have recalled that Das klagende
Lied is not later but at least as old, if not a little
older, than Hans Rott's symphony and contains more »Mahler«
in it than this work that inspired such enthusiasm. And
perhaps people can also come to the realization that it
is now high to time to clear the »field damage« caused
by momentary euphoria for a more reasoned as well as more
comprehensive view of things. |
| We now have
sufficient material at our disposal. Together with a good
many articles, there are two book-length publications
dedicated to the phenomenon of Hans Rott. The compilation
including a biography, letters, notes, and documents from
the unpublished papers of Maja Loehr (1888-1964) edited
by Uwe Harten in 2000 deserves special consideration because
it presents facts and not any hasty, partially incorrect
conclusions and, moreover, offers a glimpse behind the
walls of the Lower Austrian State Insane Asylum, where
Hans Rott had to spend the miserable rest of a life which
had begun under chaotic circumstances but also had shown
great promise. |
| Hans Rott
was born in the fifteenth Vienna district on August 1,
1858. He was the son of the actor Carl Mathias Rott (Roth)
and the singer and actress Maria Rosalia Lutz. His parents
could not get married until after the death of his father's
first wife in 1860. By the time the wedding was held in
October 1862, Maria Rosalia already had a second child,
Karl, who had been born on December 20, 1860. In the documents
Archduke Wilhelm is listed as his father. Nevertheless,
father Rott had the two half brothers legitimized, so
that from the beginning of 1863 they could bear the same
family name as their (official) parents. |
| Hans Rott's
education proceeded along the usual paths. The financial
circumstances of his parents were satisfactory, and there
was no reason why he should not pursue his early musical
inclinations. During the winter semester 1874-75 he enrolled
at the Vienna Conservatory, where he soon was exempted
from tuition for a year and then was able to meet his
expenses as a scholarship student. He studied harmony
under Herman Grädener and piano under Leopold Landskron.
In addition, he received instruction in organ from Anton
Bruckner, who valued him very highly and wrote him an
excellent recommendation even as late as 1880. |
| Meanwhile
Rott's family circumstances had taken a drastic turn for
the worse. His mother had died in 1872, and in April 1875
his father suffered an accident on the stage that made
it impossible for him to continue his acting career and
eventually led to his death in 1876. Rott had to take
an office job for a time but also could welcome two prizes
of commendation from the conservatory, continued his education
despite all the adversities which he had to suffer, and
soon was able to pursue work more appropriate for a musician
when he was hired as the organist of the Josefstadt Sacred
Music Society together with free lodging. |
| At the same
time Rott's own catalogue of works was expanding. The
first major product of his conservatory years was the
Symphony in A flat major for String Orchestra (1874-75).
It was followed by works including a symphony finale,
one overture each to Hamlet and to Julius Caesar,
and an orchestral suite. Between these works he wrote
sacred and secular choral pieces as well as a few songs.
He also sketched the beginnings of an oratorio. After
he had been relieved of his duties as organist at the
beginning of in November 1878 (at his own request and
together with an extensive letter of recommendation),
he began working out his Symphony in E major. He submitted
its first movement to a composition competition at the
conservatory already in July of the same year. Although
Anton Bruckner put in a word for him, Rott was the only
graduate who did not receive a prize. Nevertheless, his
diploma certified that he had completed the »study program
of the School of Composition ... with outstanding success.« |
| Shorter trips
and excursions, a »great love« (the first and only one
of Rott's life), and the completion of the symphony all
occurred during 1879-80. The Pastoral Overture
begun in 1877 was completed. A second symphony was composed.
A sextet for strings was finished. (1) At the beginning
of September Rott attempted without success to get Hans
Richter to perform his first symphony. Hardly two weeks
later he paid a call on Johannes Brahms, who, together
with Eduard Hanslick and Karl Goldmark, had to decide
about the awarding of a state fellowship. Brahms doubted
that Rott was the author of the symphony because »together
with such beauty there was also so much triviality and
nonsense in the composition that the former could not
stem from Rott.« Rott then made another try. In the meantime
he had good prospects for a post as music director or
choir director with a choral society in the Alsatian town
of Müllhausen/Mulhouse but continued to cling to the hope
that his symphony might be performed. On October 14 he
played it for Hans Richter. On October 21 his friends
brought him to the train bound for Müllhausen. During
a stopover in Linz he heard knocking on the walls of his
room. On October 22 or 23 he continued his journey. A
fellow traveler wanted to light a cigar. Rott drew his
revolver and threatened the man. He was afraid that Brahms
had loaded the train with dynamite. On October 23 he was
brought to the Psychiatric Clinic of the General Hospital
in Vienna »in a completely crazy state.« It was thus that
his death sentence was pronounced. After a first suicide
attempt Rott was transferred to the Lower Austrian State
Insane Asylum at the beginning of 1881. It was there that
he died on June 25, 1884, not even at the age of twenty-six.
|
| To the credit
of those who treated Rott, it must be said that he held
out relatively long. Robert Schumann lasted exactly two
years and five months in Endenich, and Friedrich Hölderlin
in all likelihood would not have managed to survive so
long in the Autenrieth Clinic in Tübingen if he had not
been brought in time to master joiner Zimmer's tower.
Who would have wanted to wear the Autenrieth mask, which
was supposed to keep clinic patients from shouting and
according to all descriptions looked very much like Hannibal
Lecter's muzzle? (2) Who would have wanted to survive
even only one day while wearing such an inhumane device
if he was not a genuine psychopath? |
| Here an excursus
on the state of psychiatry in 1880 seems to be in order.
»The classification of mental illnesses ... cannot yet
be made on an anatomical basis,« so we read in the then
most up-to-date encyclopedia. Under the same heading it
is also stated that »mental illness« concerns »those illnesses
which announce themselves by disturbances in the area
of sense impressions, of the imagination, volition, or
action.« The tenor of all these remarks is that »delusions,«
»insanity,« and »persecution mania« are in principle incurable,
while »psychiatry« - unabashedly - admits of definition
as the »science of the healing of the mind.« Every abnormality,
even if it is nothing more than the abnormality of feeling
a special calling within oneself, can be interpreted as
as an illness and accordingly treated by having the person
concerned locked up: »Every overexertion of the brain,
excessive mental and emotional excitement, is to be avoided;
on the other hand the development and exercise of physical
strength very particularly should be kept in mind; the
goal must always be to work as much as possible toward
the simplest, most ordered external relations, toward
the avoidance of all passionate excitements, toward the
accustoming to subordination under objectively given circumstances.«
|
| What here
sounds like a caricature consists of excerpts from the
fourth edition of Meyer's Konversations-Lexikon,
which came out on the market four years after Rott's death.
Here we find the treatment ideas of a clique which - undisturbed
by any and all scientific knowledge - for many years had
been licensed to maintain the status quo, which amounted
to seeing to »the accustoming to subordination under objectively
given circumstances,« whether Social Democrats or large-format
crazies like artists were concerned. The Gulag was everywhere.
(3) |
| This does
not mean that normal behavior includes resorting to armed
force to keep a smoker from his pleasure. But the lack
of diagnostic acumen distinguishing the guild of self-appointed
psyche-plumbers is also quite evident in the case of the
unfortunate Hans Rott. What would have happened if, for
example, a few friends of the most profoundly insecure
composer had kidnapped him, taken him off to the Styrian
Salzkammergut, provided him with a piano, a stack of music
paper, a couple of cubic meters of firewood, and a lumberjack's
ax, if they had given him the opportunity for mental and
physical activity in quiet surroundings? But as things
were, surrounded by people suffering from genuine and
imagined mental illnesses, Rott had to lose his marbles,
like Robert Schumann before him. |
| Two things
here are cause for alarm. The arbitrariness with which
the supposed diagnoses are passed on in the secondary
literature, and the self-glorification of the diagnosticians,
who always recognize the symptoms but never the possible
causes. And it is precisely the causes that would be interesting
to investigate. Why is it that Robert Schumann as well
as Hans Rott and Hugo Wolf all meet under the rubric of
»Johannes Brahms«? Is this really only a biographical
coincidence? Anton Bruckner must have been of another
opinion, given the fact that at the coffin of his favorite
pupil Rott he made such heavy accusations against his
local rival Brahms that even Rott's friend Friedrich Loehr,
the father of the aforementioned journalist Maja Loehr,
saw himself forced to do some fancy argumentative footwork:
»I believe Brahms behaved in this way [in his rebuke]
toward the >beginner< who enlisted all the expressive
means of his art, with a good >educational< intention;
given the experiences and convictions of his own artistic
formation and nature, he could not do otherwise, and I
believe that in doing so he objectively committed a most
genuine artistic injustice. At the time, however - it
was just before his illness manifested itself - Rott could
no longer at all be saved and had fallen victim to his
bitter fate: his illness, caused by very different psychic
and emotional factors, had already been long in preparing«
(Friedrich Loehr, Die Musik, 1903-04). |
| Loehr's exertion
here was no success, first, because he suppressed the
»very different factors« and, second, because he overlooked
other cases and incidents from the Brahms's files: Heinrich
von Herzogenberg over many years attempted to gain recognition
from the master; Max Bruch had to put up with the question
about where he had obtained such nice score paper; and
even Ethel Smyth, truly a tougher operator than Rott or
Schumann, did not exactly have flattering thing to report
about him. Moreover, one should recall what Hans Richter,
a friend of Brahms, did to Hugo Wolf's Penthesilea:
he tore it to pieces because the young Wolf had attacked
the great Brahms in his reviews. ... |
| Our purpose
here is not to find fault with Johannes Brahms; his works
render him immune from prosecution. But one should perhaps
consider the fact that Wolf and Rott, like Gustav Mahler,
were pupils of Anton Bruckner and were not situated on
the classicistic line that played the coquet with the
status quo. At best one might be willing to accept the
hypothesis that the whole thing was nothing more than
a perpetuated misunderstanding, in other words, that Brahms
did not understand the meaning of the trivialities that
do indeed gambol about in Rott's symphonic score. This
would be an acceptable way out of the bind, inasmuch
as one could cite, so to speak, the fate of Mahler's oeuvre
as a star witness. How long did it indeed take until the
disparate substances of his works were recognized
for that which they really are - parts of those worlds
that in his view symphonies had to be? »Where the beautiful
trumpets blow,« where »Brother Jacob« strides by in the
funeral march, and where the »cuckoo has pleased itself
it death.« Until a few decades ago many observers who
had set out to teach banality to fear went out on strike
at these points. The task of the citation, of the allusion,
of the thematic »silhouette« in which one only has an
inkling of what might come into view behind the contours
- all of this as well as the life's achievement of Robert
Schumann, who without exaggeration may be described as
the genuine father of literary-musical composing, remained
concealed from the view of the music world's moral policeman
. Those who do not hear Florestan's »In des Lebens Frühlingstagen«
in the first theme of the piano concerto or cannot follow
the manifold transformation of the almost obsessive rhythmic
formation |
|
|
| with its different manifestations throughout
the composer's whole oeuvre but at the most are capable
of hearing the »Marseillaise« in the Faschingsschwank
will have no end of trouble with a large part of the late-romantic
repertoire, whether Peter Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler,
Hans Rott, or even Johannes Brahms is involved. As far
as Brahms is concerned, he who would have had to have
been an idiot not to have immediately discovered what
kind of mirror the young student of his rival was holding
up to him on September 16 or 17, 1880: a symphonic world
map of the nineteenth century on which he himself, the
Northern German Viennese-by-choice, had his place as one
of the many famous greats of the past and present. |
| To be sure,
with his positively »indecent« advances Hans Rott had
set the fox to keep the geese and with a wondrous naiveté
had stepped on the toes of a composer who did not like
having his toes stepped on - as will be shown in the finale
of the symphony. In his »megalomaniac« quest for a universal
music Rott evidently had not reflected on what he was
getting into when he tried to reconcile the Viennese antipodes
Brahms and Bruckner and even went far beyond this in his
effort to integrate different stumbling blocks like Wagner
and Schumann into his composition. |
| Let us put
ourselves in the place of Rott's hearer on that occasion
and try to imagine what he would have felt when he encountered
the first movement from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
(at ca. 5' on the present recording) or had to suspect
a reference to the Spring Symphony in the ample
use of the triangle, not to mention the reminiscences
of Lohengrin and Rheingold, which the anti-Wagnerian
No. 1 could not have ignored. The second movement does
not make things any easier in that here after some time
(1'40) the Schumann motif alluded to above appears. Owing
to its frequent employment, it quite easily could be linked
to »Clara,« and Brahms was genuinely familiar with it
(here one need only think of the beginning of his third
symphony). Rott did not leave it at one single reference;
no, he repeated the motif again a few minutes later (4'30)
so that even »an ass could hear it« - and very probably
without knowing the nerve he would hit with it. |
| And in the
finale Rott really went too far. After he lets the previous
events pass in review very much in the manner of Anton
Bruckner's fifth symphony, he chooses a melody that (unintentionally)
does its provoking: its proximity to the finale theme
from Brahms's first symphony is so obvious (4'40) that
the evaluator perhaps may have felt that Rott was poking
fun at him. The repetitions (8'20 and 12'25) would only
have intensified the unfavorable impression. And the fact
the Rott had the quasi-quoted Brahms end up proceeding
into Valhalla with the gods was clear evidence of his
mental state: Rott had fallen victim to the »primary insanity«
which affects »mostly young individuals of seventeen to
twenty-five or older ones, namely women, of forty to fifty
years of age.« |
| From the
viewpoint of Rott's fellow student Gustav Mahler, things
were completely different. Although the two students had
quarreled horribly about whether one needed a roast for
composing or might not rather make do with some cheese
(Quargel, a variety of Harz cheese), the disputes
between the roast-beef composer Rott and the cheese composer
Mahler never went so far that their mutual estimation
would have suffered for it. Even when Rott was in the
insane asylum, he answered as follows when asked if he
could remember Mahler: »Certainly, certainly, Mahler is
a genius« (according to the notes of his friend Joseph
Seemüller). And Mahler said of Rott, »What music has lost
with him cannot at all be measured: his genius rises to
such soaring already in his first symphony, which he wrote
as a twenty-year-old and which - it is not too much said
- made him the founder of the new symphony as I understand
it. That which he wanted, however, has not yet been reached
entirely. It is as when somebody gears up to throw something
as far as he can and, still unskilfully, does not completely
reach the goal. But I know where he is aiming. Yes, it
is so related to my very own that he and I seemed to me
like two fruits from the same tree, which the same soil
has produced, which the same air has nourished. I could
have obtained infinitely much from him, and perhaps we
too together in a certain way would have exhausted the
content of this new time which was dawning for music«
(Gustav Mahler in the memoirs of Nathalie Bauer-Lechner). |
| It is documented
that Gustav Mahler already very early had precise knowledge
of the E major symphony. Joseph Seemüller, who visited
Rott on Christmas Eve 1882, reported to his pitiable friend
that his former companion Mahler had recently played the
work in a private circle. Nevertheless, the influence
that the score had on Mahler's own formation, the role
that is played in his symphonic music, cannot be answered
with a general rewriting of music history. |
| Above all
we will have to reach an agreement about what connections
we want to look for. The importance of quotation and allusion,
significant in both cases, speaks very generally in favor
of what Mahler termed the kindred nature of the two composers.
Elements such as the horn tones in the second movement
of the E flat major symphony point to a more direct relation,
and so does the beginning of the last movement, in which
the »intermediary realm« from the finale of the Resurrection
Symphony, with its bird calls and its »proclaimer
in the desert,« incontestably is prepared. Both composers
have in common a free treatment of traditional forms.
The design of Rott's symphony, however, is a very concrete
example of something that is not to be found in Mahler.
To a certain extant, Rott designed his symphony in a temporal
progression, so that the sequence of movements is accompanied
by a continuous increase in performance duration.The twenty-minute
tone poem at the end turns the course of musical events
toward immeasurability. Nevertheless, in both composers
the symbol of the status quo comes undone, and immediately
Robert Schumann's ambivalent aphorism, according to which
»form is the vessel of the creative spirit,« comes to
mind. Conservatism will always interpret this statement
to mean that creativity has be made to fit the prefabricated
earthen vessel, but the progressive spirit either forms
his own vessels in order then to fill them or produces
them while he strives forward ... It was thus that Schumann
was able to write his Carnaval or his Fantasy,
which formally is nothing other than a retrograde and
overextended Moonlight Sonata in three tone poems.
At the end it was thus even possible for Gustav Mahler
to turn the inside outside in a symphony, namely in his
ninth symphony. And so too Hans Rott was able to design
his quasi-spiral-form masterpiece. (4) |
| There is
a very good reason why the scherzo occupying the third
position has not yet been discussed. For it is here that
the roast-beef composer and the cheese composer meet on
such intimate terms that one might be (mis)led to think
that Mahler not only helped out his pal with a couple
of ideas but also with a whole supply of elaborated score
pages and later integrated them into the scherzo of his
own first symphony after Rott, for the reasons described
above, no longer had any need of them. |
| Naturally,
the circumstances involved were quite different. The third
movement of the E flat major symphony is about eight years
older than its Mahlerian counterpart and without the slightest
doubt a blood relative of the same. Much more interesting
than the often almost note-for-note agreements should
be the questions why Gustav Mahler had a funeral march
follow his scherzo à la Rott and why the outburst in the
third movement of the second symphony is produced with
Rott's »words«. Might it perhaps be that the greatest
master (after Schumann) of sophisticated quotation was
commemorating the »Titan« and then went on to help him
to »Resurrection«? We should not forget that Mahler's
scores are no less rich in allusions than the trailblazing
novels of Arno Schmidt: one always has the suspicion that
what one hears is not what is meant. Until the present
day is there anyone who has ever figured out what business
the first sonata from Paganini's Centone is has
at the beginning of the fifth symphony, why Beethoven's
Storm Sonata and Schumann's Manfred Overture
frolic about in the first movement of the sixth symphony,
or why the first movement of the third symphony begins
with the song »Ich hab' mich ergeben,« which, in turn,
seems to be a silhouette of the main theme from the finale
of Brahms's first symphony? |
| He whose
aim it is to produce a »universal symphony« must include
and ought not to exclude. This supposedly so naive principle
opens the gateway to the new symphony. A universe full
of music, full of signs and concepts is at one's disposal,
everything can be placed in relation to everything else
and becomes a glass-bead game, but the decision whether
the hen is more important than the egg suddenly becomes
completely irrelevant. Suddenly times and places really
having nothing to do with each other stand side by side.
(How did it happen that Mahler had Charles Ives's third
symphony in his baggage when he made his last Old World
journey?) And it is precisely at this point that things
get exciting - without one having to take refuge in Bernd
Alois Zimmermann's »Kugelgestalt der Zeit«! |
| In contrast
to the Symphony in E major, Hans Rott's Pastoral Overture
(1877-80) is overvalued. Although a few "Mahlerian elements"
can be detected in the score, the work as a whole points
in another direction. To be specific, the fugato has the
effect of a piece of work from Bruckner's contrapuntal
school, and it would be extraordinarily bold to interpret
this »fugue« as »flight« from the thunderstorm that Ludwig
can Beethoven had let pour down over the »Lustiges Beisammensein
der Landleute« in his Pastoral Symphony. If at
all, then it is toward the end of Rott's pretty atmospheric
picture that one gets the sense of an anticipation of
Max Reger. But Reger, at least verbaliter, was
oriented more toward Brahms, and for this reason much
less importance should be assigned to the seeming anticipation
than to the fact that in Hans Rott one of the many great
talents of the nineteenth century was crushed between
the millstones of the status quo and then was deprived
of his creative life because of his supposed megalomania
and persecution complex. |
|
Eckhardt van den Hoogen
|
|
Translated by Susan Marie Praeder
|
| (1) The symphony remained a fragment, and
Rott evidently destroyed the sextet shortly before his
death. |
| (2) The Silence of the Lambs with Anthony
Hopkins and Jodie Foster, USA, 1990. |
| (3) Today, of course, everything is completely
different. A disciplinary sentence is a landmark achievement
that not infrequently has as its consequence running amok
and sex crimes or leads those who are released, depending
on their particular obsession, to commit suicide, blow
up a courthouse, or mow down the members of a parliament. |
| (4) A thorough, »measure-by-measure«
analysis of the symphony by Frank Litterscheid is found
in the Hans Rott volume of the Musik-Konzepte. |
|
| Copyright van den Hoogen/cpo ©2002 |
| With kind permission of the author (Pro
Classics) and cpo
|
|
This article is part of the booklet of the CD::
Symphony in E major
Pastorales Vorspiel (Pastoral Prelude)
Vienna Radio Symphoniy Orchestra
Dennis Russell Davies
2002 (cpo 999 854-2)
More about the CD
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