Choral Fantasy (Beethoven) a rather troubled one; according to the composer's secretary, Anton Schindler, it "simply fell apart," a result most likely attributable to insufficient rehearsal time. Because of a mistake in the execution of the piece, it was stopped half way through and restarted. In Ignaz von Seyfried's words: The work includes a sequence of variations on a theme that is widely felt to be an early version of a far better known variation theme, namely the one to which Beethoven set the words of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth Symphony. The two themes are compared below. \new Score
Curse of the ninth had to wait a further 13 years for its first performance). Still another case is that of Louis Spohr, who wrote and completed a tenth symphony and then withdrew it. After Mahler, some composers used as examples of the curse include: Kurt Atterberg, Elie Siegmeister, Alfred Schnittke, Roger Sessions, Egon Wellesz, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Peter Mennin, Malcolm Arnold and David Maslanka. However, many of these examples have elements which tend to work against the superstition: Schnittke wrote his Ninth and last symphony with his left hand while virtually paralysed and unable to speak from a series of strokes; the authenticity