the curse of the ninth

Here’s a pretty well acknowledged condition for being an artist: you’ve got to be at least a little wacked in the head. Take, for instance, Gustav Mahler. He spent pretty much his entire career obsessing over Beethoven’s legacy, particularly over Beethoven’s ninth symphony, a giant in both scale and impact and the first symphony to incorporate a choral component. It was Beethoven’s last, though; he died shortly after its completion. Franz Schubert, Antonin Dvorak, and Anton Bruckner suffered similar fates, as, eventually, did Mahler. He was so terrified of writing a ninth symphony that after completing his eighth, he instead wrote an unnumbered symphony simply (or not so simply) entitled Das Lied von der Erde: Eine Symphonie für Tenor-Stimme, Contralt -Stimme und große Orchester (nach Hans Bethges “Die chinesische Flöte”). He then proceeded to a ninth symphony, thinking he had defeated the “curse”, but died while composing his tenth.

Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian-American composer of the twentieth century, described the “curse” as follows: “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.”

Of course, there are also many exceptions to “the curse of the ninth”, notably Dmitri Shostakovich, who deliberately avoided writing a momentous ninth and went on to compose a total of fifteen symphonies.