Curse of the ninth
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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.
This superstition is thought to have begun 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"). 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, and possibly Louis Spohr. Franz Schubert's Great C major Symphony would have been called No. 7 in Mahler's time, 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. (Bruckner considered his F minor Symphony just a school exercise, and the D minor Symphony nowadays known as No. 0 he declared invalid).
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 but in praise of Stalin's regime.[citation needed] 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 utimately went on to complete fifteen symphonies in total.
Some counterexamples are: Hans Werner Henze (10), Edmund Rubbra and Robert Simpson (11 each), Heitor Villa-Lobos and Darius Milhaud (12 each), Glenn Branca (14), Allan Pettersson (17), Nikolai Myaskovsky (27), Havergal Brian (32), Alan Hovhaness (63) and Leif Segerstam (150). Henze and Rubbra both wrote choral Ninths.
Composers before Beethoven, like Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, are not considered relevant to this superstition.
[edit] References
- Cooke, Deryck. Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Lebrecht, Norman. Mahler Remembered. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
- Mahler-Werfel, Alma. The Diaries, translated by Antony Beaumont. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
