Rott: Symphony in E major; Pastorales Vorspiel.

Dennis Russell Davies, Radio Symphonieorchester Wien. CPO 999 854-2.

The music world, like any other, can be pretty freakish sometimes. Take the case of Hans Rott (1858-1884), for instance. He was a contemporary of and fellow student with Mahler, but how many people know that? As a composer he only wrote a couple of pieces of music and then went mad. After writing the Symphony in E he tried pressing it on Brahms and Bruckner, but to no avail. Brahms even got annoyed with Rott's pushiness (and possibly with some of the symphony's content that mimicked his own work), and the result was that Rott became depressed, delusional, hostile, and dangerous. He was locked up in a mental institution in his early twenties and died there several years later, both he and his music forgotten!

Now, none of this would be of any concern to us today if his Symphony in E hadn't been rediscovered just a few years back and re-evaluated. Seems scholars took notice of the fact that it bears striking resemblances to the work of Brahms, Schumann, and Wagner, to be sure, but, more important, to Mahler. The trouble is, you see, Rott's piece predates most of Mahler's. The immediate conclusion reached by some musicologists, therefore, was that ...