Hans Rott - novel

[Alan Howe]

For our non-English native speakers:
'Mondschein' = 'Moonlight'
'Moonshine' = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine

[Paul Barasi]

This discussion is like going back to the beginning again: it contains biographical and musical inaccuracies and I'm sure much of the ground has already been covered correctly on this site.

On biography, Rott wasn't about to marry Louise and that was a highly significant factor among many which led to his mental illness. The roots of his collapse accumulated over a few years and Brahms and the train was merely the final trigger. Possibly the heavy use of triangle in the symphony was even resembling a sound he kept hearing in his head back as early as 1878. He found out about his illegitimacy very late and that was among the traumatic blows, rejection and lack of recognition that marked his life. Though Mahler was mixed up, he could cope with whatever happened; Rott was more highly strung and never could.

On the Music, Mahler deliberately quoted from Rott and did so more than from any other composer and he continued to do so throughout the Mahler symphonic cycle. Yes, Mahler 2 does make significant play of Rott, around the resurrection theme but most interesting is Mahler's 1st. For this is the only one in which Mahler draws from a second Rott work, the Suite in E, which builds in the finale and rounds off the symphony with the standing bell horns chorale.

Mahler was not plagiarising but recycling Rott as a memorial to a sometime friend, and as a monument to Rott's ideas. For though each had a different style and clearly had Rott lived what we have would be regarded as very early and rudimentary, nevertheless Mahler was impressed both by Rott's tunes and by his structural and other ideas. We hear Rott stalking through the Mahler cycle with brass fanfares, over-brief love theme, ghost waltz, mixing beauty with banality, bird sounds, etc. And Mahler never just took a Rott theme but transformed it and often ran two tunes together.

Mahler was most taken with the second half of Rott's symphony and with Rott's treatment of Wagnerian quotes, with his own 1st echoing Rott's Lohengrin underscoring and elsewhere, Rott's take on the Siegfried Idyll & Brunhilde's awakening. This second half of Rott's symphony is significant for turning into a personal narrative, the Scherzo as an imagined fantasy of a Viennese Ball with Louise in which he totally loses it emotionally, and which is quite prophetic of what then happened in real life, and the finale in which he imagines gaining recognition as a composer. Mahler in turn used some narrative in his symphonies but whereas the identity of his hero is attributed to being himself, probably it is a merged character of Rott and himself. Mahler took Rott's early death quite badly but then, his life was surrounded by death and he obsessed with this. Rott also obsessed over death and many of the poems he set for his songs had this has an important theme.

Finally, whilst Rott's symphony is undoubtedly his most important work, we have many others which have been performed and recorded.

[Alan Howe]

An interesting post - thanks.

[matesic]

Interesting certainly, but nullius in verba as my professor used to say (I didn't necessarily go along with him). Whose conclusions/speculations are these, and what are his or her sources? Much of Paul's persuasive narrative seems to imply a privileged view of the workings of both Rott's and Mahler's minds. Unless Mahler openly confessed to his "recycling" of Rott's ideas at the time his symphonies were first performed (and after his own failure to have Rott's symphony performed), we can hardly be blamed for enjoying some speculation of our own.

As for "going back to the beginning", musicology isn't a field like the hard sciences in which we can ever come to a definitive conclusion and move on. Like most arguments, this one comes down to the precise meaning of words like "plagiarism" and "memorial" and the slants we put on them. I think Paul Banks's phrase "creative exploitation" nicely captures the ambiguity of Mahler's motives.

[Alan Howe]

Can we once and for all settle the matter of Mahler's 'use' of Rott's music? Did Mahler quote him precisely anywhere (i.e. if only to develop a theme in his own way) or are we talking about such close correspondences of musical invention that Mahler couldn't have written 'X' without Rott's prior 'Y'?

[matesic]

Certainly not "metamorphoses of a theme by..." but a creative dependency of a subtler kind reflecting the two composers' spiritual affinity. The quotations may not be exact, but they are so close and so numerous as to leave no doubt that Mahler knew what he was doing, and that his symphonies would have been quite different had Rott survived or never existed at all. The world wouldn't immediately have noticed, but surely Mahler must have realized he'd be rumbled in the end?

[Alan Howe]

Can we be more specific, please? What did Mahler use of Rott's, and where?

[matesic]

Haven't we been here before? The most obvious to me were the quotations from the third movement of Rott's symphony in the scherzi of Mahler 1 and 5, but other writers have noticed many more. I wasn't convinced that Mahler quotes Rott's string quartet in his Adagietto though.

[Alan Howe]

Well, we've been here before, but not at the level of detail provided by Nicolas Couton with regard to Mahler's use of music by Bruckner, Beethoven and Schumann in his 2nd Symphony. So: are we talking about equally specific quotations of Rott by Mahler, or merely imitations? And if we're talking about quotations, let's be much more specific, if possible with YouTube examples...

[matesic]

It's all out there if you have the time and energy to track it down, so maybe someone who knows far more about it than I do will provide us with chapter and verse? As of today I was surprised to discover that Donald Mitchell appears to have overlooked it even in the second (1978) edition of his 3-volume biography of Mahler.

[Alan Howe]

It's all out there if you have the time and energy to track it down

No doubt; but until someone does, we're still in the realm of assertion, not proof...

[Paul Barasi]

Hi matesic, Of course it's speculative and no, I wasn't writing this as a sourced research paper. I've seen no evidence to support my view that Rott's 3rd and 4th movements of his symphony were biographical narrative. All I can do is read his biography, listen to the music and match what I hear with when it was written. For instance, the Scherzo was written away from Louise and Vienna during his summer holiday in Neustift am Walde between July 3 and September 13, 1879. This was after he had fallen in love with Louise and before he had declared himself to her. As it happened, he wasn't allowed to marry her but given that he was without means and reputation and she was 17, it was a fairly obvious fear for Rott to have at that time that he wouldn't be allowed to marry her. In the Scherzo I hear a Viennese Ball, a love theme, and his frustration with rejection and in the finale, his ultimate gaining of recognition alongside Wagner, Bruckner (start & end of 5th Symphony last movement) and Brahms, who he quotes, with the ending described by others as ascending into Valhalla.

We can't know for sure what Mahler actually thought even from what he said, like anyone else. But calling Rott and himself "Two fruits from the same tree" gives room for suspecting he thought he had a right to pick some of Rott's fruit. Sometimes it's suggested Mahler didn't deliberately use Rott's music: it was just in the air of Vienna. Mahler knew music backwards and anything he used from other composers was intentional and held purpose and meaning for him. I believe Rott, both as a personality and as a source of music, had significance for Mahler. Whilst I'm sure I'm not alone, to believe that isn't proof of course. On "Memorial" – then quoting Paul Banks, this is an odd conjunction as he wrote that Mahler "enshrined the memory of his friend in his own music". To me, that is a memorial, described by the guy who rediscovered the score, although I can understand if others think I've stretched his meaning.

For anyone wanting to read about Mahler's use at the end of his 1st symphony of the core theme from Rott's Suite n E, Internationale Hans Rott Gesellschaft DIE QUARTE No 2/2005 is still available: www.hans-rott.org/die-quarte/DIE%20QUARTE%20-%20THE%20FOURTH%20II_2005.pdf 

The Suite is OOP, recorded just the once: Hermus/Philharmonische Orchestra/Accousence ACO-CD 20305
(Alan can email me if he wants to put the MP3s on our site)

[matesic]

How I failed to become aware of this fascinating double controversy over the last 25 years I have no idea, but I'm catching up fast. The correspondence between Mahler's 1st symphony and Rott's Suite in E surely deals a hammer blow to the idea that both composers were merely afflicted by the same "something in the air" or the water supply.

For me a crucial difference between Mahler's exploitation of Rott's themes and his quotations of other composers is that one does not listen to Bruckner 4, Beethoven's 10th violin sonata or Schumann's Dichterliebe and immediately think "Mahler used that!", whereas such is certainly the case with Rott's symphony. On my third hearing the third movement scherzo sounded even more like a supernatural premonition of some of Mahler's, uncomfortably like the corpse that fertilized Mahler's soil.

Becoming increasingly feverish, I even started wondering about the plot of Das Klagende Lied, the relationship between the brothers, the contest for the red flower in the forest with its prize of a fair princess, the fratricide with the murderer eventually exposed by the music played by the flute carved from one of his victim's bones! But surely Mahler chose that story while Rott was alive and well?

[Alan Howe]

The correspondence between Mahler's 1st symphony and Rott's Suite in E surely deals a hammer blow to the idea that both composers were merely afflicted by the same "something in the air" or the water supply.

You may well be right. But we we need chapter and verse here. Which part of Rott's Suite did Mahler use/copy /exploit in his 1st Symphony? Specifics, please!

[matesic]

Follow Paul's link 3 posts above this!