Alleged victims of the Curse of the Ninth: from left to right, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler

As the ninth (and final) part in our Season-long examination of the symphony, the subject of this article may well have been a foregone conclusion …

How many symphonies did Beethoven write?

The answer to this question may seem obvious to the seasoned music lover, but in the heyday of high street retail, it served as a quick litmus test for classical record shops interviewing potential new employees. While the smart alec might be tempted to mention Wellington’s Victory (on the grounds that it’s subtitled A Battle Symphony) and/or the existence of sketches for a Tenth, Beethoven set such a standard that the mere concept of writing nine symphonies has gained something of a mythical status since – though not always in a good way.

As mentioned in our article on the numbering of symphonies, the moment a 19th-century composer neared completion of their ninth, their publisher would be falling over themselves to hold them up as Beethoven’s equal. Considering the number who stopped there – or more specifically, are supposed to have died while working on their next – it is hardly surprising that rumours started to circulate about some kind of jinx on anyone who attempted to write any more. The Ninth itself came to be regarded as a work in which its composer made a statement so profound that the world could not possibly be prepared for the message they might wish to communicate in a Tenth, so Fate would intervene, with deadly consequences.

Let’s look at the evidence, starting with Beethoven himself.

It is really only with the benefit of hindsight that we might wonder where he would have taken the symphony after the Choral. He did, after all, live a further three years, making sufficient progress on his next symphony for the musicologist Barry Cooper to make a realisation of its first movement in 1988. If Beethoven himself did not complete the work, it’s quite simply that his focus shifted to another genre, the string quartet.

As such, it seems more likely that any curse surrounding the creation of a Tenth Symphony was a matter of keeping later composers in their place: equalling Beethoven’s total was one thing, but to exceed it would be tantamount to blasphemy. Calling it a day after writing nine, on the other hand – as Malcolm Arnold did in 1986, going on to live another five years – could be interpreted as paying respectful homage to the great man.

At any rate, the first composer truly to pay the Curse of the Ninth any heed was Mahler, more than 80 years after Beethoven wrote his – by which time several others had died while working on their Tenth Symphony. Or had they? Schubert, the first to follow Beethoven chronologically, actually only finished seven, leaving another five in various stages of completion, so any claim that he was composing his Tenth at the time of his death is necessarily subjective.

Dvořák, on the other hand, unquestionably did write nine symphonies. The last of these (From the New World, which the Orchestra plays in its 2025/26 Season Finale, 13-15 May) was premiered in late 1893, a full decade before his death, with no sign of his working on another afterwards. Are we to suppose, then, that whatever entity lay behind the Curse lost patience? It had already been a little inconsistent with Bruckner, obligingly overlooking the two (unnumbered) symphonies he had composed in the 1860s, only to kill him off when he was within spitting distance of finishing his official No. 9 – in other words, after he had actually completed ten.

This flippancy aside, it was no joking matter for Mahler, a man so superstitious that he deliberately cast Das Lied von der Erde (the follow-up to his gargantuan Symphony No.8) as a song cycle rather than a symphony. Believing he had sidestepped Fate, he went on to write an actual Symphony No.9 … and died while working on what would be officially recognised as his No.10, effectively falling prey to the Curse anyway. For all that it comes across as a musical equivalent of the – equally dubious – Curse of Tutankhamun, there is a genuinely sad irony in Mahler’s fears coming true in the end, but his case certainly cemented the reputation of the Curse of the Ninth. (In keeping with the degree of interpretation required to prove its veracity, the Inside No.9 episode of the same name is built around the premise that a composer will die before completing a Ninth Symphony, one of few nitpicks that can be made about its plot.)

But what of the composers whose symphonies reach double digits? If anything, Shostakovich – the best-known example – also appears to have avoided the Curse, in his case with a Symphony No.9 (also played by the SCO on 13-15 May) which is decidedly light-hearted and often devoid of profundity. As it is, he’d probably have been wryly amused that an external force hell-bent on preventing him from composing more could be considered any worse than life in Soviet Russia. The dangerously changeable whims of Stalin and his successors ensured his day-to-day survival was anything but a certainty, and although he did get into trouble for his Ninth, its number was purely incidental.

Following a pair of symphonies about Russia’s experience of the Second World War, there were high hopes for Shostakovich’s Ninth. His No.7, ‘Leningrad’, had been understood to praise the residents of that city (which reverted to its name of St Petersburg in 1991) during its siege by the Nazis in 1942, receiving its premiere there while the conflict was still ongoing. By the following year, Russia – or more accurately, the Allies – were gaining the upper hand, but Shostakovich’s No.8 proved a harder sell, its darkness and lack of a triumphant resolution at odds with this turn of events.

Written in late 1945, the Ninth was expected to round off an unofficial trilogy with a celebration of the Soviet victory. It was originally conceived on an enormous scale, with vocal soloists and a chorus alongside the orchestra, but turned out to be playable by a chamber orchestra (a rare occurrence among Shostakovich symphonies), with a running time of well under half an hour. Some critics in the West weren’t particularly impressed either, one American newspaper deriding the composer’s “childish” response to the defeat of the Third Reich.

Since then, Milhaud, Villa-Lobos and Maxwell Davies are among those to have survived the composition of ten or more symphonies. Could it be that Shostakovich, in writing a Symphony No.9 that is often genuinely funny – effectively laughing in the face of danger – actually succeeded in placating the Curse of the Ninth once and for all? (His own Symphony No.10, premiered in 1953, is a much more serious work, possibly written in response to the death of Stalin earlier that year.) Either way, with Philip Glass having fifteen symphonies to his name at the time of writing, it can hopefully be laid to rest.

Returning to our classical record shop interview, a more interesting question would perhaps be “name a composer who wrote nine symphonies (and no more).” There have been references to many of these throughout the course of this series, so over to you: what would your answer be?