Examples of composers who did not live long enough to fulfil their early promise are dotted throughout music history, and his admirers would no doubt claim that Hans Rott was one of those figures. Rott was born in Vienna in 1858, but by 1880 he was already beginning to show signs of a mental collapse; he was committed to an asylum the following year, where he died of tuberculosis four years later. Among those who attended his funeral were Bruckner, who had been his organ teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire, and Mahler, with whom Rott had briefly shared lodgings when they were both students; Mahler in particular thought extremely highly of his friend, declaring him “a musician of genius ... who died on the very threshold of his career” and “the founder of the new symphony as I myself understand it”.
