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",
Symphony, D 2B (Schubert) already knew what their function was in a Classical orchestra. \relative c' { </score> Symphony, D 2B (Schubert) Schubert's Symphony in D major, D 2B/997, is an unfinished work that survives in an incomplete 30-bar orchestral score. The sketch includes the whole slow introduction and the first theme of the Allegro before breaking off. It is one of Schubert's six unfinished symphonies. It was begun in 1811, when Schubert was fourteen years old, but it is unclear exactly how much he wrote before he abandoned the symphony (despite the fact that he would live another seventeen years). Its instrumentation is