Curse of the Ninth Symphony

It is believed that Arnold Schoenberg was the first to speak of the Curse of the Ninth Symphony, attributing the invention of this prejudice to Gustav Maler . According to Schoenberg, Mahler kept two precedents in mind: Beethoven himself, who died while working on the Tenth Symphony , and Anton Bruckner , who was working on the Ninth at the end of his life (the final of which, it seems, remained unfinished), but in essence the symphony was also the tenth, because Bruckner refused one of his symphonies, putting the ∅ sign on it instead of the number (now this symphony is known as the Bruckner Zero Symphony ); strictly speaking, another symphony was written earlier by Bruckner, but the composer himself initially considered this composition to be student experience. Brukner in his work directly focused on Beethoven and, starting his Ninth symphony, he deliberately took for her the same tone in which Beethoven's Ninth symphony was written. Mahler, according to Schoenberg, saw in all this a mystical regularity and tried to circumvent it, giving the subtitle "symphony" to his work " Song of the Land ", which is a six-part vocal cycle for two voices with an orchestra. After that, he completed his Ninth Symphony and died while working on the Tenth (it is characteristic that Beethoven had an unnumbered Choral Symphony). "Those who wrote their Ninth come too close to the otherworldly," Schönberg remarked on this in a speech to the memory of Mahler on October 12, 1912 ^[1] .

Later in the list of composers on whom the Curse of the Ninth Symphony spread, they began to include Franz Schubert and Antonin Dvorak . Currently, it is assumed that Schubert owns nine symphonies, although two of them were not completed by the author (Symphony No. 8, the so-called “Unfinished” , consists of two completed parts and a third sketch; the symphony in E major is written completely, but it was never orchestrated). Dvorak wrote exactly nine symphonies, but the first one was not performed by the orchestra and was not published during the life of the author; moreover, Dvorak himself considered her manuscript irretrievably lost. It is more or less obvious that neither Mahler nor Schoenberg had them in mind ^[1] .

At present, the recollections of the Curse of the Ninth Symphony are being given by a whole range of composers of the 20th century, whose symphonic works stopped at the Ninth Symphony. The most significant among these names are Ralph Vaughan Williams , Malcolm Arnold , Kurt Atterberg , Roger Sessions , Egon Welles . Alexander Glazunov in the second half of the 1900s He began work on his ninth symphony, but at the end of the first part, he postponed and did not return to the plan, having lived for another two and a half decades. The Ninth Symphony was the last for Alfred Schnittke , who wrote it just before death; In addition, Nikolai Korndorf , who was busy at the request of Schnittke's widow and re-creating the work, died during this work (this edition was completed by Alexander Raskatov and performed under the direction of Dennis Russell Davis ; there is also an earlier and very different reconstruction of Gennady Rozhdestvensky ) ^[2] .

Dmitry Shostakovich , starting to work on his Ninth Symphony , remembered the historical precedents. After it, Shostakovich wrote six more. However, according to musicologist Solomon Volkov , the Curse still overtook Shostakovich: The Ninth Symphony with its harnessed color caused Stalin’s strong discontent, followed by major troubles in the life and career of Shostakovich at the turn of the 1940s-50s. ^[3]

Of course, in the XX century there were quite a few other authors who wrote more than nine symphonies; among them, in particular, Hans Werner Henze and Edward Tubin (10 each ), David Diamond and Edmund Rabbra (11 each ), Heitor Villa-Lobos and Darius Millau (12 each), Henry Cowell and Allan Pettersson (17 each), Moses Weinberg (22), Nikolai Myaskovsky (27), Alan Hovaness (67) and others.

Nikita Bogoslovsky called his eighth symphony, written in the 1980s, “Last.” The composer claimed that he simply “said everything in a symphonic genre,” although many believed that he was simply afraid to write the 9th symphony after Beethoven. However, after the 8th symphony, Bogoslovsky retired from songwriting, although he lived for another 20 years (he did not become in 2004).

• Bayan Northcott. Bruckner: The Curse of the Ninth // The Independent , 31 January 2003. (English)