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 708A (Schubert) for another seven years. British conductor and composer Brian Newbould, an authority on Schubert's music, has speculated that the symphony was left incomplete due to problems Schubert faced in orchestrating the sketch. In 2012, Newbould was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to complete the symphony. He had previously completed three other unfinished symphonies by Schubert (the seventh (D 729), eighth (D 759), and tenth (D 936A). At that time he had done work to make the existing fragments of D 708A performable, but this was his first attempt to go beyond the fragments and complete the entire structure. His completed