Music
Rott stopped
Robin Holloway
Another youthfully ambitious first orchestral work is still more unlikely to be heard live than Dvorak's Bells of Zlonice. The single completed symphony by the obscure and tragic Hans Rott has recently been issued on an excellent Hyperion CD, no doubt its final resting-place. It is a fascinating document.
Rott, like his contemporary and close friend Mahler, was a favourite pupil of Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatoire in the late 1870s. The first movement of his symphony was written in 1878 when he was 20. In spite of official discouragement he went on to complete it by spring 1880 and that autumn played it over to Brahms. The not-so-old master (47 that year) was so brutal that within a month Rott's delicate mental balance had collapsed. Enforcing at revolver point the extinction of a fellow- passenger's cigar he explained that through Brahms's malign cunning their train was packed with dynamite. The diagnosis after a year in an asylum was that 'his recovery is no longer to be expected'. He lived on into spring 1884.
Another friend and contemporary, Hugo Wolf, had already in early 1879 been cruelly snubbed by Brahms. Then in 1881 Mahler's teenage cantata Das Klagende Lied failed ignominiously to gain a prize from a committee on which Brahms was the luminary, a decision that, as Mahler saw it, sentenced him to the 'treadmill' of a conductor's career. Some 20 years after, now at the top of his profession (and well into his Fourth symphony), Mahler re-read the score of Rott's symphony with a view to including it in his Vienna Philharmonic concerts. His reaction was ardent. 'What music has lost in him is immeasurable.' Rott's juvenile symphony soars to such
heights as to make him the founder of the form as Mahler now understands it. 'His innermost nature is so much akin to mine that he and I are like two fruits from the same tree . . . We would have had an infinite amount in common.' Thus Mahler to his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner, in the summer of 1900.
After hearing Rott's work their musical commonality seems more like appropria- tion than empathy. That summer Mahler completed his Fourth symphony, whose first movement virtually reproduces a pas- sage intact. But countless moments from the earlier symphonies show that in the intervening years his friend's work had sunk deep into his memory — the resembl- ances of Rott's scherzo to that in Mahler's Resurrection symphony are only the most obvious. The influence is not confined to details: the astonishing originality of Rott's ways of filling out an hour-long symphonic canvas has not been lost. Nor does the resemblance cease after 1900. The best music in Rott, the elaborate slow introduc- tion to his finale, constantly recalls its equivalent in Mahler's Sixth of 1904 and thence that of the unfinished Tenth of 1910, where some of these new ways of integrating and articulating a large struc- ture achieve their boldest realisation. And Mahler's middle-period scherzi are even more `Rottian' than ever.
Of course Rott's work is immature and sometimes downright callow. It too is 'full of quotations', most specifically from the chorale in Bruckner's Fifth and the finale tune from Brahms's First (itself — 'as any ass can see', according to its blunt compos- er — derived from the joy theme in Beethoven's Choral); and the whole is swathed in Wagner — mystic shimmer, sounds of nature, and a curious composite of festive exaltation from the Siegfried love duet and Old Nuremberg. In spite of its high promise and occasional moments (even, in the scherzo, a whole movement) of genius, it does not yet show the ability to fuse and synthesise. Whereas Mahler's contemporaneous Klagende Lied is so utterly itself — himself, rather — that it cannot be called simply promising. The briefest excerpt from the first four sympho- nies and their adjacent songs so proclaims its composer that it is hard for us to understand how they could have been widely dismissed as 'conductor's music', though Mahler's wide eclecticism becomes more apparent as the years go by.
Since Stravinsky brought it out of the closet such creative rapacity is (perhaps) better understood. Only the other day Thom Gunn was saying, 'Talent has to be remorseless in the way it gets its nourish- ment: it eats and runs.' Maybe his very avidity for his friend's work explains why Mahler failed to promote it after all. And we remember that Brahms himself was a greedy devourer of more than sardines, though presumably his beastliness to young composers stemmed from detestation of artistic tendencies quite unthreatening to his own achievement.
Meanwhile the actual sound of Rott's work — a 'Mahler symphony' before the event, but doomed to be heard for ever with hindsight — suggests two parallels, one sublime, one ridiculous. It recalls Mahler's Tenth in its half-realised sketchi- ness: a latent scheme of enormous scope is imperfectly embodied in music that, chez Rott, is simply not yet up to it, and, in the case of the mature master, has not yet been worked up to full compositional pitch. The other parallel recalls an aspect of the musical scene at Cambridge some 15 years ago. A well-placed official at one of the nearby US military bases was writing 'one- finger' Mahler symphones which were transformed into the real thing by a fluent undergraduate, copied, and recorded by an orchestra of student performers. Ersatz- Mahler, written with hindsight and know- ingness, sounds astonishingly like the half- formed striving of his tragic friend exactly 100 years before. Except, that is, for the occasional touch of genius.
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