Nine is the magic number. Or the unlucky one. Or a statistical fluke. Let’s investigate.
Classical music has plenty of drama, but few stories are as delightfully spooky as the Curse of the Ninth. The legend goes like this: a composer who writes a ninth symphony is doomed, and they won’t survive to write a tenth. So if your symphony count is creeping up, maybe take up watercolors.
The case for the prosecution
Exhibit A is a lineup that would make any superstitious person nervous:
- Beethoven finished his Ninth in 1824, complete with the “Ode to Joy” finale and a rather important chorus. He sketched ideas for a tenth, then died in 1827.
- Bruckner was working on his Ninth in 1896 and never finished the last movement. In fairness, he was famous for endlessly revising his symphonies, so this may have been more of a perfectionism problem than a curse.
- Vaughan Williams premiered his Ninth in 1958, in his mid-eighties, and passed away later that same year.
- Dvořák wrote his New World Symphony, and then… lived another decade or so, writing operas and other works. The curse apparently took a long lunch.
Then there’s Mahler, the most superstitious of the bunch, who deserves his own paragraph.
Mahler tries to outsmart fate
After his Eighth Symphony, Mahler got nervous. Rather than number his next big work, he called it Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), a symphony in everything but name. Take that, destiny! Then he wrote a symphony he happily called his Ninth, figured he’d dodged the whole thing, and started on a Tenth. He died in 1911 with the Tenth unfinished.
Mahler had been trying to dodge the curse, but Arnold Schoenberg (regular readers might remember him from our post on the Second Viennese School) is the one credited with popularizing it. His take was that anyone who reaches a Ninth has gotten a little too close to the great beyond, and the Tenth might reveal something we’re not ready to know. It’s dramatic, it’s poetic, and it makes for an excellent concert program note.
The fine print
Here’s where the curse starts to wobble.
- The numbering is a mess. Schubert’s Great C major Symphony is now called his Ninth, but back then it was numbered differently, so the “curse” only kicked in retroactively. Dvořák’s New World was originally published as his Fifth, and it took years for the other symphonies to sort themselves out. Even Mahler didn’t know about most of the “victims.”
- Plenty of composers waltzed right past nine. Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies, including a short, cheeky Ninth that dodged everyone’s expectations of a grand, triumphant one. Villa-Lobos wrote twelve, and Havergal Brian wrote thirty-two. Philip Glass has said everyone worries about a ninth, and then went on to write more than a dozen.
- Survivorship bias is real. Writing nine symphonies takes a long career, and a long career means you might be getting on in years anyway. Haydn wrote more than a hundred symphonies and lived to 77. Mozart wrote forty-one and died at 35. So the curse must only apply to composers who show restraint.
Verdict: coincidence, but a great story
Musicians are a superstitious bunch. We don’t say the name of a certain Scottish play, and we all have a lucky pen or a particular warm-up ritual. The Curse of the Ninth is really a story about how a big number and a few famous funerals can make a pattern look like fate.
What you can do
If you’re a composer, you’re probably safe for now. Most of us are years away from writing even a first symphony. If you’d like to try, our private lessons and Music Theory program are a good place to start. We can’t guarantee you’ll dodge the curse at nine, but we’ll help you write a first symphony, and number one is statistically very safe.
So, do you believe in the curse? Or are you already working on your fourteenth, just to be safe?
