Classical music has its fair share of drama, but one of its strangest myths might be the «Curse of the Ninth». It plagued many composers of the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea is that once a composer wrote their ninth symphony, Fate tapped them on the shoulder, and they were doomed to perish before their tenth symphony ever saw the light of day.
On paper, the curse looks quite convincing: Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvořák and Ralph Vaughan Williams all kicked the bucket after finishing their Ninths. Anton Bruckner never even got to complete his, and Gustav Mahler died of a cardiac disease while working on his Tenth.
Arnold Schoenberg was a firm believer in the curse, declaring: «It seems the ninth is the limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away.» And in more modern times, even Philip Glass finished his Tenth Symphony before going back to completing his Ninth.
Fate? Or just coincidence? One way or the other… creepy enough to make composers triple-check their numbers, and even try to outsmart whatever devil might be at work!
Mahler tries to outsmart Fate
The superstition really began with Gustav Mahler, a composer intensely aware of musical history and deeply anxious about death. Noticing the pattern with Beethoven and Bruckner before him, he came up with (what he thought was) a cunning plan: Rebrand my symphonies to trick the curse! Ha!
Instead of writing a «Ninth Symphony», he composed Das Lied von der Erde, a symphonic song cycle that, in essence, was just a symphony. But he declined to call it one. Only after did he allow himself to write Symphony N° 9. He had survived fate. Except… he died while working on Symphony N° 10, leaving it unfinished. Coincidence that the final movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony reproduces the sound of funeral drums? Doom, it seems, is not easily fooled by clever labelling.
How the Ninth earned its reputation
Of course, at the time of writing Mahler’s Symphony, the only cases he would’ve been aware of were Beethoven and Bruckner.
Beethoven, who had completed his revolutionary Ninth Symphony about unity and hope, crowned by the emotional «Ode To Joy», in 1824, shifted his attention to his late string quartets. Although he had jotted down a few rough sketches for the next symphony, Beethoven died three years later following a prolonged disease.
Bruckner abandoned his second symphony part halfway through (he didn’t find it very inspiring) and, to add to the confusion, renamed it Symphony N° 0. He took some time working on the Ninth because of his respect and admiration for Beethoven. Bruckner died without finishing his Ninth, meaning that he left just under 10 symphonies in total.
The anxious-ridden Mahler wouldn’t have known about Schubert’s «The Great» Ninth Symphony either, because it was called the Seventh at the time. (The numbering is still hotly debated today: Schubert left Symphonies N° 7 and N° 8 incomplete, so some publishers dropped them from the count, while others include them. Hence the numbering chaos!) Unfortunately, poor Schubert died at the young age of 31 and never heard his own «The Great» performed live.
Dvořák’s Ninth «New World» Symphony, meanwhile, was published as his fifth symphony, before four additional symphonies appeared after his death. German composer Louis Spohr is also frequently included in the curse list, but he did in fact complete a Tenth Symphony before eventually withdrawing it.
Doesn’t it all read a bit like a crime novella? Some mysterious force at work stopping the great composers dead in their tracks?
Why ninth symphonies sound like farewells
You could argue that some ninth symphonies feel like eerie goodbyes. Mahler’s Ninth slowly fades into silence, Beethoven’s lifts the human voice to the heavens, and Schubert’s carries a timeless beauty that you wish would never stop. Bruckner’s Ninth misses its final movement, but the Adagio: Langsam, feierlich (solem and slowly) doesn’t end abruptly at all. It’s like the number 9 has a personality in Romantic classical music: reflective, dramatic, maybe a little fatalistic.
Of course, plenty of composers have composed more symphonies beyond their Ninth: Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, Joseph Haydn wrote 104 symphonies. And as you do sometimes, Leif Segerstam wrote a casual 327 symphonies…
From symphonies to rock stars
A more recent curse in popular music is the Club of 27, where cultural icons like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse all died at the tender age of 27. While only linked to age and not, say, their particular album number, the age of 27 has become a cultural symbol of premature loss.
Whether you believe in it or not, the «Curse of the Ninth» shows that even the biggest and brightest composers of our time could be shuddered by the idea of a spooky force, closing the curtains on a composer’s career after the last note of the Ninth ends…
