As far as Western history books are concerned, not a lot happened in 1884. If you were Vietnamese, you might have taken issue with the French conquering your country (which they called Cochinchina). If you were Charles George Gordon, you might have cared about Khartoum, and what a damned inconvenient place it was. If you were a fan of that newfangled European sport “football” and lived in the East Midlands area of England, you might have cheered the founding of the Derby football club . . . and regretted it soon thereafter, when Derby County turned in the worst season in the history of English football. Gustav Mahler, who didn’t follow English football or French colonial policy too closely, cared about 1884 for an even less notable event: the death of Hans Rott, the greatest symphonist who never was.

Rott was Anton Bruckner’s favorite student and admired by his classmate Mahler. But he was forgotten until the 1980s, when musicologist Paul Banks, spurred on by a quote of Mahler’s, found Rott’s principal surviving work, the Symphony in E major, in the archives of the Austrian National Library. Along with this grandiose symphony, Banks unearthed a tantalizing and saucy story of “what-ifs,” geniality and madness.

A life cut short

Hans Rott’s picaresque story starts with his mother, the eighteen-year-old soubrette Rosalia Lutz, whose dalliance with the fifty-one-year-old, married actor Carl Mathias Roth led to the birth of Hans in 1858. After Herr Roth’s wife died, he married Rosalia and legitimized four-year-old Hans. While he was at it, he also legitimized Hans’ little half-brother Karl, the result of Rosalia’s acquaintance with Archduke Wilhelm Franz. When Hans was fourteen, his beloved mother — he adored her but was aware of her spotty reputation — died. Four years later his father followed, leaving Rott orphaned before he finished college.

Rott had begun his musical studies with the tentative support of his father in 1874. His organ teacher was the great Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner, whose work, while rooted in the formal traditions of Beethoven and Schubert, was inflected with Wagnerian harmony and orchestration. Bruckner thought very highly of his student and later proclaimed to a group of fellow teachers who had been deriding a Rott composition: “You will hear great things yet of this man!” It wasn’t Rott the world would hear of, however, but two of his fellow students: Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler.

Rott’s story took a turn for the bizarre in September of 1880, when the volatile composer sought to show Johannes Brahms his symphony. The already famous Brahms (forty-eight at the time, with two symphonies and one piano concerto under his belt) was part of the commission that would judge whether Rott qualified for a government stipend — a stipend that the ambitious but impoverished young man desperately needed. Brahms took a bite out of Rott with merciless criticism and unwittingly triggered the breakdown of the already troubled young composer, allegedly accusing Rott of plagiarism and suggesting that the symphony contained so many trivialities and nonsense that the extant moments of great beauty couldn’t possibly be Rott’s own.

A few weeks later, desperate and on his way to take a job as a choir director in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse, Rott pulled out a gun on the train to keep a fellow traveler from lighting a cigar. Brahms, Rott claimed, had laced the coach with dynamite! It would have been funny had it not been so tragic. Forty-four months later, on June 23, 1884, after confinement in the state asylum of Lower Austria and several suicide attempts, Hans Rott died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.

After Rott’s death, Mahler had these very flattering words to say about his former classmate:

It is impossible to estimate the loss that music has suffered. Consider the heights of genius to which his First Symphony rises, a work he wrote at the mere age of twenty and which makes him, without exaggeration, the founder of the new symphony as I understand it. Of course, he doesn’t quite reach what he aimed for. It is as if someone wound up for the farthest of throws and then, just a bit clumsy still, misses the target by some measure. But I know what he aims at. Indeed, he so relates to my innermost, that he and I seem to me as two fruits of the same tree, created from the same earth, nourished by the same air. I could have benefited so much from him and maybe the two of us would have exhausted the contents of this new time that then dawned for music.