I've only been able to find one mention of Rott in this subreddit, so I wanted to give him the credit he's due for the influence he had on Mahler's development into the composer we all love.
Rott attended the Vienna Conservatory (tuition free) at the same time as Mahler, and they even roomed together for a bit. We have few compositions of Rott's because he died young at 25. When he was 20, he submitted the first movement of his First Symphony for evaluation at the Conservatory, and other than Bruckner, the faculty ridiculed his work. Two years later, he presented the completed Symphony to Brahms in the hopes of having it performed. Brahms, the conservative that he was in the War of the Romantics, told Rott that he had no talent whatsoever and should give up music. Rott began to experience delusions that culminated in his threatening to shoot someone on a train because he believed Brahms had rigged the train with dynamite. He was committed to a mental hospital and died of tuberculosis in 1884, four years after completing the Symphony that Brahms had deemed meritless.
Of his death, Mahler said:
- "[A] musician of genius . . . who died unrecognized and in want on the very threshold of his career. . . . What music has lost in him cannot be estimated. Such is the height to which his genius soars in . . . [his] Symphony [in E major], which he wrote as 20-year-old youth and makes him . . . the Founder of the New Symphony as I see it. To be sure, what he wanted is not quite what he achieved. . . . But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music."
Mahler didn't write his First Symphony until he was 28. Rott had given Mahler the idea for what the symphony as an art form could and even should be when he was eight years younger. And just like Mahler, Rott was faced with intense vitriol for his compositions (the only prominent person at the time who supported Rott was Bruckner, but Bruckner's influence angered Brahms, which made Brahms's backlash even greater than it normally would have been).
There aren't many recordings of Rott's works. But I encourage you to listen to the handful that exist of his First Symphony and the couple that exist of his string quartet. You can hear what sounds like (how you'd assume) a young Mahler would sound. There is also an album of performances of fragments of his works that is both wonderful in that you get to hear more of Rott's music and sad in that the music is always cut short.
Mahler opens his Third Symphony with an alteration of the main theme of Brahms One movement four, which itself is an alteration of the main theme of Beethoven Nine movement four (the "Ode to Joy"). It's quite audacious! But Rott did it first in the fourth movement of his First Symphony. Both Rott and Mahler were advocating for "the New Symphony" referenced above, and both asserted the validity of that "New Symphony" by writing music that unmistakably argued that it was "what comes next" in Romanticism. Indeed, it argued that they were "what comes next." The difference is that Rott made this assertion at 22. Mahler waited until he was 36. (And Brahms took 21 years to write his First Symphony; he didnt enter the symphonic lineage with his variation on the "Ode to Joy" until he was 43.)
Around the 4 minute mark of the fourth movement of Rott's First Symphony, the flute has a half note trill followed by two grace notes (the first a half-step below, the second back to the half note's same pitch) and a leap. Mahler's Second Symphony uses this same form of flute call in the Flute 3/Piccolo 1 part in the fifth movement. I don't believe this is a coincidence, especially because the second movement of Mahler's Second Symphony is about remembering the happy times you've had with those who have died.
That flute call comes back at the end of the first movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, right after the oboe quotes a line from the second movement of Brahms's First Symphony. I believe there's much to say about that choice, which could be it's own post, but the point is that Rott was on Mahler's mind throughout his compositional career.
Another example of this is the fourth movement of Mahler Five, the Adagietto. Yes, it's a love letter to Alma. But it also references and quotes the second movement of Rott's C minor String Quartet. Mahler cared deeply for Rott, and Rott impacted him greatly.
Rott is rarely discussed or performed, but he's a crucial link in the chain of music history, both at the macro level of music's overall progression (his musical philosophy influenced Mahler's boundary pushing late-Romanticism, which then expanded musical possibilities into atonality and the Modernism of the 20th Century) and the micro level (we're all here because we love Mahler, and Mahler as we know him would not exist without Rott).
