Casting Out Nines
Mythbusting the Curse of the Ninth, and mythmaking with the Mahlers
The 2025 BBC Proms lineup was announced yesterday, and I’m happy to have an essay in this year’s festival guide, and even happier that I was asked to contribute something that touches on a few of my favorite subjects: classical mythbusting and general esoterica.
In this case, the myth to debunk was the Curse of the Ninth; the idea that composers are done in either while writing their Ninth Symphony or before they can complete their Tenth. Three such symphonies factor into this year’s Proms program: Beethoven, Bruckner, and Dvořák. Spoiler alert: the curse doesn’t hold up. Even among these three composers, Dvořák lived another 11 years after the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” and seemed uninterested in working on another symphonic work, dedicating his final years to operas. He didn’t even consider the “New World” to be his ninth, based on a confusing system of cataloguing his works that I unravel a bit in the Proms essay.
Still, how many program notes encourage a writer to fall down a numerology rabbit hole, building a Pepe Silvia-esque grid of equations in order to determine whether or not any of the most famous names associated with the Curse of the Ninth had the number nine encoded into their life paths? I felt like Pierre Bezukhov in the section of War and Peace where, swayed by the verse in the Book of Revelation, he counts the number of the beast, “for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” (Which, in numerology, also works out to a 9.) Pierre manipulates the data to fit his narrative, working out that l’empereur Napoléon tallies up to 666. His own name doesn’t work out to the same until he styles it as l’russe Besuhof, which he then takes as a divine ordinance. “He did not know how, by what connection he was bound up with that great event which had been predicted in the Apocalypse; but he did not doubt that connection for a moment.”
There are few different calculations that can occur with numerology, prime among them being the life path number, in which you add the numbers in a person’s date of birth together and reduce them until you get to a single digit (or 10, 11, 22, or 33 — all of which I’ve seen flagged as exceptions). This methodology came from the irrefutable source of Cosmopolitan magazine, whose own life path number was 9 and therefore seemed like a reliable source. However, none of the birth dates for the composers on my list added up, so I sought alternative methodologies.
I switched to a system closer to that of Pierre’s, assigns the numbers 1 to 26 to each of the letters of the English alphabet. Nonetheless, the Apocalypse seemingly had better things to do than weigh in on the BBC Proms. I wasn’t able to hit on a 9 for Beethoven, Bruckner, or Dvořák, no matter how I maneuvered the inputs. ANTON BRUCKNER reduced to 11 or 2, as did LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN. ANTON JOSEPH BRUCKNER gave me a 3. ANTONIN DVORAK reduced to an 11, although I wonder if the diacritics have any influence on numeric value. JEAN SIBELIUS added up, but he lived more than 30 years after the premiere of his Seventh Symphony and scrapped plans for his eighth long before then. Or would the Eighth actually count as his Ninth if we considered Kullervo to be his First, even though he had written a categorically-titled First Symphony?
This ouroboros of guessing and second-guessing numbers (which, as my accountant sister insists, don’t lie) is why I was never destined for AP Calculus or for filing my taxes on time.
As Schoenberg writes in his landmark treatise on harmony, Harmonielehre, “What is closest has the greatest affinity, what is furthest, the least.” He meant this in reference to modulation between notes, but it also works as an aphorism for confirmation bias.
One famous Ninth not on the roster for this year’s BBC Proms is Mahler’s, which is a shame as the Curse of the Ninth in some ways originates with him. Other composers had felt it impossible to write a symphony that would merit sharing a numerical value with that of Beethoven’s (“Who would be able to do anything after Beethoven?” asked Schubert, who died while working on his Tenth Symphony), but it was Mahler who developed a case of neuroses in the shadow of the “Ode to Joy.” Freud agreed to the extent that he diagnosed the composer with obsessional neurosis during a four-hour walk the two had in August of 1910.
By that point, Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony, though he had found a loophole in his fear of the Ninth: When he was writing his Ninth Symphony, he said it was actually his Tenth, since his symphonic work Das Lied von der Erde was really like his Ninth Symphony. It was, argues psychiatry professor Vladan Starčević, one of the many ways in which Mahler, preoccupied by the idea of his own mortality, tried to spite the reaper, alongside his subjugation of Alma Mahler, a young and beautiful wife who was a composer in her own right before marrying Gustav.
This fear, as Starčević notes, was not unfounded: Bernhard and Marie Mahler’s first son had died in infancy. Gustav was their second; the first to live, burdened by the specter of an older brother who hadn’t survived. He subsequently watched as six of his younger siblings also died during infancy; another died at 13. In 1889, he lost both of his parents as well as one of his sisters, and assumed care for his remaining four siblings. One died by suicide six years later. The most devastating blow of all came in 1907, when Mahler’s beloved daughter Maria died of diphtheria.
Throughout all of this, death was a constant in Mahler’s work. He gives his singers the line “I will die in order to live” in the text for his Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection.” Death and his fiddle make a cameo in Symphony No. 4, and his Symphony No. 6 (written shortly after the self-obvious Kindertotenlieder) involves a custom-built hammer to deliver three fatal blows. What was closest to him earned some of his greatest affinity.
Freud, however, wasn’t interested in any of this backstory. “According to Freud, death does not exist in the unconscious and everyone believes that they are immortal in their unconscious so that fear of death rarely, if ever, can be a part of unconscious neurotic conflicts,” Starčević writes, adding that fear of death in Mahler’s case “had no explanatory power and could only be a disguise for deeper problems, presumably the unresolved, unconscious childhood conflicts of a sexual nature.” (In a bit of irony that Mahler would have appreciated, Freud himself had a numeric fixation on the number 61, as he assumed he would die before his 62nd birthday.)
Despite Mahler’s parenthetical relationship to the BBC essay, I fell down a rabbit hole on his own relationship to the number 9. The most famous representation of this was his attempt to circumvent the Curse of the Ninth through the Das Lied von der Erde loophole. But this comes less from a sense of numerology than it does from Mahler’s hero-worship of Beethoven, the only composer (besides Wagner) he considered to be “beyond reproach.” And even Wagner deferred to Beethoven, calling his Ninth the “mystical lodestar of all my fantastic musical thoughts and aspirations.” It was Wagner’s writings on Beethoven’s Ninth (1846’s On Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and 1873’s On Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) that inspired Mahler to undertake an obsessive reorchestration of the work, one that he worked on for decades to little success. (He had less admiration for Bruckner — though he had lessons from his Viennese forebear, he considered the composer’s Ninth “the last word in absurdity.”)
Beyond his compositions, however, the number nine comes up frequently in accounts of Mahler’s life. He made his New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting Tristan und Isolde on January 1, 1908 with just nine days of rehearsal (a paltry schedule compared to what he would have spent on such a work in Vienna). His eventual home in New York, once he became music director of the New York Philharmonic, was on the ninth floor.1
But his real relationship to the number nine comes through in his relationship to Alma. Alma, who began to compose at the age of 9, and who gave up her passion in deference to her husband. It took him nine years of knowing Alma to ask her about her own work, although in that time he did sent her a series of nine postcards from the Dutch city of Zaandam, artfully spaced out with sentences breaking off on one and continuing on the next, and one postcard (of Peter the Great’s former bedroom in the city) left completely, suggestively blank. The series culminates with a portrait of Peter, a detail I wish Freud could have weighed in on.
Mahler was living with his younger sister, Justine (who had become his de facto housekeeper), at the time of his courtship of Alma, and their eventual marriage (on the 9th of March) would cause some friction between the two women. And, as it happened, Mahler would only get nine years with Alma: He died ten weeks to the day after their ninth anniversary. The crisis in their marriage that prompted Mahler’s one-time consultation with Freud took place in its ninth year. An anguished chord in the opening movement of his unfinished Tenth Symphony, comprising nine notes, appears shortly before he scrawls in the margins a note to Alma: “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” (To live for you! To die for you!)
This brings to mind another leitmotif: Olympia Dukakis’s recurring question in the film Moonstruck, “Why do men chase women?” She first poses this question to John Mahoney’s character, with whom she shares a happenstance dinner after he’s dumped by one of his NYU students in the middle of a restaurant (after a conversation that feels like it may be something out of the Mahlers’ domestic life). “Nerves?” Mahoney posits after some consideration.
“I think it’s because they fear death,” she responds, dabbing her lips with a napkin in between bites of minestrone. Mahoney is nonplussed. “Maybe,” he says, noncommittally, before launching into a speech on why he chases women. He finds them charming, the only spontaneity in the same classes he’s been teaching for years upon years at the same school. The few precious weeks he gets with one of his students are a liferaft, even if they all inevitably realize he’s “just a burnt out old gasbag and [they’re] as fresh and bright and full of promise as moonlight in a martini.” (“What you don’t know about women is a lot,” Dukakis responds.)
Dukakis’s character, the matriarch of a multigenerational Italian family living in Brooklyn, is fixated on this question after learning that her husband is cheating on her. Later that evening, she poses the same question to Danny Aiello, cast in the role of her daughter’s fiancé. At the time, they don’t realize, but both her husband and his fiancée are at the opera with their respective affair partners. After pontificating on Adam’s rib, Aiello’s character accidentally backs into the correct answer, so accidentally that when Dukakis confirms “That’s it!”, he thinks he’s still being interrogated.
If we can say, with even the most Aiello-level of certainty, that Mahler feared death, that’s likely the answer (or at least an answer) to why he married Alma, as well as an answer to why he wrote symphonies. This is also what Ken Russell hints at with his 1974 film, Mahler, one of a series of composer biopics he directed (“bio” used very, very, very loosely here).
Told in a series of flashbacks hitting on the key points in the Mahlers’ marriage as he takes his final train ride, Mahler doesn’t give us the anticipated final beats: the death of the artist, the funeral procession, the proclamations of greatness that lives past any mortal envelope. Instead, Gustav and Alma leap off the train, as if they’ve both taken a cocktail of B-vitamins and amphetamines.
At the station, they pass Mahler’s physician, who has just confirmed on the phone that the composer’s supposedly sickly condition is fatal. This is contradicted by the patient himself, exiting the train arm-and-arm with his freshly-reconciled wife.
“You can go home, doctor,” shouts Robert Powell as Mahler. “We’re going to live forever!” Freeze-frame on his smiling face and fade to credits, all underscored by the ebullient opening movement of the composer’s Sixth Symphony. This scoring is significant: the movement’s soaring melody represented Alma (at least in her version of events). There isn’t a single hint at the three fatal hammer blows that will be struck towards the finale, underscoring this work’s nickname as the “Tragic” Symphony. Death, Russell seems to be saying, is lurking in the corner; inevitable and eventual.
In this light, I was curious as to Alma’s own numerological readings. Her birth date didn’t add up to nine. Her full birth name (as it’s suggested be used), ALMA MARGARETA MARIA SCHINDLER, added up to 11/2. ALMA MAHLER tallied out to 3. The third time was the charm when I tried the name she took after her second marriage: ALMA MAHLER-WERFEL. Make of that significance what you will.
What Mahler himself would have made of our current cultural moment with numerology and all of the other ologies is somewhat unclear. In 1903, he wrote to Alma in disdain of the “flatheaded” occultists he encountered, seeking “hidden meanings in the world…as if they were searching for lice.” Eight years later, however, both he and Alma seemed to take a cautious curiosity while living in New York. “It was something new in those days, and he was interested,” Alma later recalled.
“We started shutting our eyes to see what colors we could see. We practiced this — and many other rites ordained by occultists — so zealously that [our daughter] was once discovered walking up and down the room with her eyes shut. When we asked her what she was doing, she replied: ‘I’m looking for green.’”
Love seeing you in the guide, and this piece! Brb off to watch Mahler
Wow I did not know about either of these films. I'm heading to the Mahler festival in Amsterdam in 2 weeks so this is perfect timing for me to watch, thank you!