Hans Rott

I was waiting in my car for my wife to finish some shopping, turned on the radio and heard a piece of music that sounded at first like something from "Hansel and Gretel". No, I thought it's not by Englebert Humperdink (no, not that one who sings pop songs, the other one who was a friend of Wagner) but it does have a touch of Wagner there somewhere.... a bit of Strauss too (no, not that one who wrote waltzes, the one who wrote "Salome").... and maybe, yes, not just a bit of Mahler, it is Mahler. It must be Mahler. But though I am not a Mahlerian I have heard a lot of his music so it couldn't be Mahler, could it? or I'd have known it.
Well it was, according to the Radio times when I looked it up, a symphony by Hans Rott.
Who? Never heard of him.
Well, he was a contemporary of Mahler - actually a fellow student - and he was coached by Bruckner and he was expected to go far up the music establishment's ladder. But Brahms didn't like his symphony, composed when he was about 20, told him to give up composing and do something else, and the famous conductor Richter didn't want to conduct the symphony in case it failed maybe. To cut a long sad story short, Hans Rott went mad, was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum (not much fun now but then.... it doesn't bear thinking about) and died of tubercolosis at the age of 22.
I played the first movement from a recording on 'youtube' and it's a marvellous work. Maybe it's too Mahlerian for Rott to be taken seriously as "his own man", but in some ways it's better than Mahler. To me anyway.
It has only recently been performed at all, lost for years. Well done Radio 3. Most of his work is either lost or destroyed by his own hands because he didn't think it good enough.
There's a marvellous new book, "The Rest is Noise", by the New Yorker critic, Alex Ross, which covers the modern music scene from the early 20th century until now and I am surprised to find Rott is not mentioned in it.