Composers who finish a ninth symphony are believed to die before writing a tenth. Beethoven, Bruckner, Dvořák, and Mahler all died at or near this point. Mahler even tried to cheat the curse by calling his ninth work something else, but still never finished a tenth.
Composers for centuries feared this curse known as the Ninth Symphony. Curse. It's a fairly simple curse. It basically said, when you write your Ninth Symphony, either while you're writing it or shortly after, you're gonna die, no one's gonna write a tenth. That was the curse, and a lot of composers proved it to be true. So we can trace it back to Beethoven as kind of maybe the origin of it. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. He was working on his 10th symphony when he died. His 10th symphony is unfinished. However, some scholars have finished it, and you can occasionally hear performances of Beethoven's 10th. But just know that when you do, it was finished by scholars because Beethoven died while he was writing it. We go on to composer Anton Bruckner. Bruckner had a habit of tinkering with pieces after he wrote them. It was very annoying to everyone in the publishing world because he would write a piece and then he would want to edit it and edit it and edit it a lot. So he premiered his 8th Symphony and was in the process of editing it, just about to start his Ninth Symphony when he died. Another one, Dvorak. Very interesting one. It seems that fate knows a little bit more than the rest of the world on Dvorak, because Dvorak. So when Dvorak published his New World Symphony, the one that possibly, if you know any music by Dvorak, you know the New World Symphony, when that was written, at the time of its publication, it was called his Fifth Symphony and then subtitled the New World Symphony. Of course, he died shortly after it. So that seems to, in a way, get around the curse, but not really, because shortly after his death, people discovered four unpublished symphonies in. In a drawer. So it was, in fact his Ninth Symphony. Sam. And then we get to Mahler, Gustav Mahler, he's probably the first one, as far as I know, that said publicly, there is a curse around the Ninth Symphony. People die when they write a ninth symphony. However, Mahler was very prolific and he had written eight symphonies. And he's thinking to himself, hey, I don't want to die, but what am I going to do? I can't stop writing symphonies, because that's. That's kind of what he did. And he was really quite good at it. If you listen to any Mahler symphonies, he's really good at it. So he came up with a plan, a way around the curse. What Mahler did is he wrote eight symphonies. After his eighth Symphony, he wrote a symphony, but he didn't call it his Ninth Symphony. He called it Das Lied van der Erde. Which means the Song of the Earth. It was structurally a symphony. It was his ninth symphony, but he called it a tone poem. He called it something a little different. Nowhere on it was it called Symphony Number nine or anything to do with the number nine. So he wrote that piece. He was quite happy with it. It went well. After it was done, he sat down and he started writing Symphony Number 10. So he never wrote a Ninth Symphony. He basically wrote a symphony, called it something different and then wrote a 10th symphony. So there's no 9th symphony. Although now people call Daslied van der Eyde a symphony Number nine of his. So that was his way of getting around the curse. However, as fate would have it, it didn't work. He never finished his 10th symphony. He, by all accounts, didn't get very far into it. He started working on it. Died shortly after. Modern composers have talked about the ninth Symphony curse. And many have written pieces past the ninth Symphony. There are some people who have written lots of symphonies. But it is still something that modern composers think about from time to time. If you're writing symphonies today, which a lot of people still do, it's something you think about.
