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 No. 3 (Beethoven) initially, the Italian phrase "Intitolata Bonaparte" ("Titled Bonaparte"), secondly, the German phrase "Geschriben auf Bonaparte" ("Written for Bonaparte"), four lines below the Italian sub-title. Three months after retracting his initial Napoleonic dedication of the symphony, Beethoven informed his music publisher that "The title of the symphony is really "Bonaparte"". In 1806, the score was published under the Italian title "Sinfonia Eroica ... composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo" ("Heroic Symphony, Composed to celebrate the memory of a great man"). Composed from the autumn of 1803 until the spring of 1804, the earliest rehearsals and performances of the