Curse of the ninth "serious" music criticism. Though composers can indeed be found who died after achieving nine symphonies (the most famous example perhaps being Ludwig van Beethoven), nine is not a statistically predominant total in the history of the symphony. In addition, while some very prominent composers (e.g. Schubert, Dvořák, Spohr, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams) are regularly adduced as examples, several of them are only credited with having "composed nine symphonies" as a result of error or oversimplification (see below). According to Arnold Schoenberg, this superstition began with Gustav Mahler, who, after writing his Eighth Symphony, wrote "Das Lied von der Erde",
Jan Václav Voříšek Vorišek died, in Vienna, of tuberculosis in 1825 at the age of 34. He was buried at Währing cemetery, where within three years his idol Beethoven (in 1827) and his friend Schubert (in 1828) ended up as well. The cemetery is now a park named after Schubert, although the mortal remains of both Schubert and Beethoven were later moved to the Zentralfriedhof the Central Cemetery of Vienna. Voříšek wrote only one symphony, his Symphony in D major, in 1821. Its style has been likened to Beethoven's first two symphonies, but its melodically inventive early Romantic idiom was similar to Schubert's.