Name: Aitchison, Jim: Tributaries
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Aitchison, Jim: Tributaries

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In 1880, the young Austrian composer and Bruckner protégé, Hans Rott tried to apply for a much-needed stipend, submitting his first symphony to a committee that included Brahms. The older composer savaged the piece and Rott failed to secure the support. Rott had fallen victim to tensions within the Vienna Conservatory between the warring Brahms and Bruckner camps. The result was catastrophic for the psychologically fragile Rott whose mind disintegrated while on a train when he produced a gun and attempted to prevent a passenger from lighting a cigar because he was convinced that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. He died from tuberculosis just a few years later aged 26 in the state asylum of Lower Austria after several suicide attempts.

Rott had been an incredibly promising composer, but it was his classmates Mahler and Wolf who were to find fame. The points of similarity between Rott’s symphony and Mahler’s early music are very striking.

The initial impetus for the composition of my piano quartet came from a decades-long obsession with the tiny early Mahler Scherzo fragment for piano quartet, which was completed by Alfred Schnittke for his piano quartet and then later used in his Fifth Symphony. However, when I encountered the extraordinary and tragic story of Hans Rott and his close connection to Mahler, socially and musically, I decided to explore this imaginatively, as if Rott hadn't perished at 26 in an asylum but had survived and had written this music in old age as an ambiguous tribute to Gustav, and remembering his breakdown on the train to Mulhouse, using Mahler’s abandoned piano quartet fragment.

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