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",
Decomposing Composers It even includes an attempt to play Beethoven's 5th Symphony, which keeps starting up and winding down, possibly to add to the "death" humour of the song. After an initial spoken section where Luigi talks to his wife on the phone, he summarizes various classical composers who are all dead. He mentions (in order of mentioning): Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, Brahms, Elgar, Schubert, Chopin, Handel, Haydn, Rachmaninov, Verdi, Wagner and Debussy. The final, spoken coda to the song includes another list of composers, complete with their death date. He mentions: During this final coda various short snippets of famous classical pieces