“So Near to My Inmost Self…”

I taught Mahler today in my 19th-century harmony class. I never teach Mahler without teaching Hans Rott. Rott (1858-1884) was a fellow student of Mahler’s at Vienna Conservatory, and for a time Mahler’s roommate. Rott went mad and died at the age of 25, after completing a symphony that sounds remarkably like Mahler. Rott wrote his symphony in 1878-1880; Mahler’s First Symphony dates from 1884-1888. If you heard the scherzo of Rott’s symphony without identification, you would swear it was some unknown Mahler work: it is identical in style, orchestration, and melody to the scherzos of Mahler’s First and Third Symphonies. The long introduction to Rott’s final movement has much in common with the finale of Mahler’s Second. Mahler inherited the manuscript of Rott’s symphony after his friend died. Mahler later called RottÂ

a musician of genius … who died unrecognized and in want on the very threshold of his career. … It is completely impossible to estimate what music has lost in him. His First Symphony soars to such heights of genius that it makes him – without exaggeration – the founder of the New Symphony as I understand it. To be sure, what he wanted is not quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music.

This is the great classical music movie waiting to be made. Two friends, Hans and Gustav (surelyÂ Hans and Gustav will beÂ the name of the movie), enter Vienna Conservatory together. One is brilliant but insecure, the other ruthlessly ambitious. Both are obsessed with finding some fusion of the styles of Wagner and Brahms, thus bringing one of the great feuds in the history of music to a felicitous close. One of the friends writes a wonderful symphony, nearly achieving their common aim. It is attacked and dismissed by the conservative Conservatory faculty; only the socially inept Anton Bruckner (played by John Malkovich) expresses sympathy for it. The friend takes his work to the great Johannes Brahms (played by a bearded Jason Robards if he were still alive), who tells him it is worthless, and that he should give up composing. The friend goes mad, becoming totally paranoid, convinced that Brahms is trying to kill him by dynamiting a train he rides on. The friend dies in an asylum, still composing but destroying his sketches, convinced they are no good. Mahler keeps the manuscript, studies it, and starts composing the symphonies his college friend didn’t live to write. From the marvelous insights of his tragic friend he guiltily creates an incredible new universe of music. It could be the great classical-music movie of all time, rivaled only by Farinelli, the wonderful Gerard Corbiau film about the 18th-century castrato with Handel as its deliciously Machiavellian villain.Â