The curse of the ninth is the superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing his own Ninth Symphony.
According to Schoenberg, this superstition began with Gustav Mahler, who, after writing his Eighth Symphony, wrote Das Lied von der Erde: Eine Symphonie für Tenor-Stimme, Contralt -Stimme und große Orchester (nach Hans Bethges "Die chinesische Flöte"). ( This was done so as to avoid the curse). Then he wrote his Symphony No. 9 and thought he had beaten the curse, but died with his Tenth Symphony incomplete.
From Mahler's point of view, the only two victims of this curse had been Beethoven and Bruckner. Franz Schubert's Great C major Symphony would have been called No. 7 in Mahler's time,[1] and Dvořák considered the score of his early C minor Symphony lost. Bruckner was superstitious about his own Ninth Symphony, not because of the curse of the ninth, but because it was in the same key as Beethoven's Ninth.
In an essay about Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg wrote: "It seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter."
After Mahler, some composers used as examples of the curse include: Kurt Atterberg, Alfred Schnittke, Roger Sessions, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Egon Wellesz and Malcolm Arnold. Alexander Glazunov completed the first movement of his Ninth but worked on it no further for the 26 more years he lived.
Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music was strongly influenced by Mahler, felt under pressure to write a momentous Ninth symphony, to be the equal of Beethoven's. Recoiling against the idea, he produced a relatively lightweight piece, quite unlike his other works of the time. In the third movement he even quotes phrases from both Beethoven and Mahler's Ninths (given to the bassoon in somewhat ironic fashion). The work ends in a playful, mischievous mood. Unsurprisingly it did not go down well with those expecting a grand gesture.[citation needed] Shostakovich ultimately went on to complete fifteen symphonies in total.
Some other counterexamples are: Hans Werner Henze (10; his ninth symphony was actually choral), Eduard Tubin (10, died writing his eleventh symphony), William Schuman (10; his first two were withdrawn), David Diamond (11), Edmund Rubbra (11; his ninth symphony was choral), Robert Simpson (11; his planned final 12th symphony was to be choral), Heitor Villa-Lobos and Darius Milhaud (12 each), Roy Harris (13; he was more superstitious about the number 13 than the number 9, and so labelled his 13th as 14th), Glenn Branca (14, although Branca's definition of "symphony" is somewhat untraditional), Rued Langgaard (16 plus an unnumbered choral symphony, Sinfonia Interna), Henry Cowell (17), Allan Pettersson (17), Moisei Vainberg (22), Nikolai Myaskovsky (27), Havergal Brian (32), Alan Hovhaness (63), and Leif Segerstam (189).
Composers before Beethoven, like Joseph Haydn (106) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (41), are not considered relevant to this superstition.
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