I was watching a TV show and it made reference to composers who all died before completing their 10th composition. So...sittin here with my laptop I decided to google it...
low and behold here is what I found.
I always wondered why famous composers never wrote a tenth symphony. I thought maybe they got bored and couldn’t be bothered, but no. It all started in 1827 when Beethoven died after writing nine symphonies. NSS (Ninth Symphony Syndrome) is well known to music scholars as an apparent cause of composers’ deaths. In 1828, Franz Schubert died after writing nine symphonies (his unfinished eighth is considered to be one of his greatest). Half a century later, NSS struck again this time claiming the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, who, despite numbering two symphonies ‘0’ and ‘00’, died while working on his ninth in 1896. Classical composers became paranoid; the Czech, Anton Dvorak, cannily tried to fool the Grim Reaper by calling his ninth symphony Number Five, but still expired in 1904 - before completing his tenth. Gustav Mahler craftily named his nine symphony Das Lied von Erde (Song of the Earth) then called his actual tenth symphony his ninth. In 1911 before finishing it, he too died. Britain’s Vaughn Williams left a nine-symphony legacy on his death in 1958. But the Finn, Jean Sibelius, stopped writing after his eighth in 1924 and lived until 1957. It is obvious very unlucky to be superstitious.
i thought this was pretty interesting.
