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.
Beginnings
According to Schoenberg, this superstition began 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. Franz Schubert's Great C major Symphony would have been called No. 7 in Mahler's time,[1] 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 now 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. Schnittke wrote his Ninth and last symphony with his left hand while virtually paralysed and unable to speak due to a series of strokes; the authenticity of the work finally performed as an interpretation of his manuscript is problematic. In any case a 'Symphony No. 0' by Schnittke has been performed and recorded, so his total should be ten. 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. 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. Shostakovich ultimately went on to complete fifteen symphonies in total. Some other counterexamples are: Hans Werner Henze (10; his ninth symphony was actually choral), Eduard Tubin (10, died writing his eleventh symphony), William Schuman (10; his first two were withdrawn), David Diamond (11), Edmund Rubbra (11; his ninth symphony was choral), Robert Simpson (11; his planned final 12th symphony was to be choral), Heitor Villa-Lobos and Darius Milhaud (12 each), Roy Harris (13; he was more superstitious about the number 13 than the number 9, and so labelled his 13th as 14th), Glenn Branca (14, although Branca's definition of "symphony" is somewhat untraditional), Rued Langgaard (16 plus an unnumbered choral symphony, Sinfonia Interna), Henry Cowell (17), Allan Pettersson (17), Moisei Vainberg (22), Nikolai Myaskovsky (27), Havergal Brian (32), Alan Hovhaness (63), and Leif Segerstam (189). Composers before Beethoven, like Joseph Haydn (106) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (41), are not considered relevant to this superstition. The level of genius on display with the Ninth Symphony was imposing to other composers of the period. It is well noted the first performance of the Ninth was a disaster, but as a work of music critics of the period were beyond words. It is speculated in the later years of Beethoven's life when his hearing was completely absent, the composer benefited from complete silence of outside interference enabling perfection in his compositions that music scholars would descibe as otherworldy. As a result, the popular opinion of the period was that the Ninth Symphony could never be bettered. And what composer would want to be compared to such perfection? For this reason, the symphony as a musical body of work lost its popularity among composers until its reincarnation by Brahms decades later.
References
- ^ Stephen Johnson, "Mahler" in Layton, Robert, editor. (1995) A Guide To The Symphony (Oxford): Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-1928-8005-5. pp. 180 - 181. Johnson compares a climactic dissonance in Mahler's Tenth to similar moments in Schubert's and Bruckner's Ninths. "At the time Mahler began his Tenth Symphony, the Bruckner [Ninth] was available only in a bowdlerised version by Ferdinand Löwe in which that culminating discord was cleaned up, but given Mahler's involvement with Bruckner, it is likely that he had seen the original." Johnson is also fairly sure Mahler knew knothing about Schubert's Tenth.
- 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.
- Dan Stehman, Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer. Boston: Twayne Publishers (1984): 163 - 169
See also
- Curse of Tippecanoe or the presidential curse
- Star Trek movie curse
- Superman curse
- Urban legend
