Alexander Glazunov (1865 - 1936) started his Symphony No. 9 in D minor in 1910 and although he lived another 36 years, he never completed it. Indeed, he did no more than finish the opening movement in short score; there is no trace of sketches for succeeding movements. Some critics have explained the Ninth's incomplete state by claiming that, like Mahler, he was inhibited by the sinister implications of composing a Symphony No. 9 in D minor: Beethoven and Bruckner's Ninths were their last. This explanation seems unlikely since nothing in Glazunov's life gives evidence that he was at all superstitious. Other critics have claimed more persuasively that the Ninth marked the beginning of the end for Glazunov as a composer: that his work as the head of the St. Petersburg Conservatory drained his energy, that his innate conservatism drained his enthusiasm in the face of modernist music by Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and that he had simply run out of inspiration. Another possible explanation for the incomplete state of Glazunov's Ninth was that the essence of Glazunov's aesthetic was his overwhelming optimism: while never facile, Glazunov's music always confidently strives toward positive goals. In his minor-keyed Second and Sixth symphonies, as in his Olympian Third and Fifth symphonies, Glazunov's music radiates belief in the power of music to overcome all obstacles. But not his Ninth: the work is as brilliantly and cogently composed as any of his works, but its tone is much darker and much less confident. From its hushed and tentative opening through its stormy sonata-form center, to its quietly sorrowful close, the only completed movement of the Ninth has none of its predecessors joie de vivre. Although Glazunov's compositional skills are as evident in the Ninth—listen to the way he transforms the opening motive of the violas into all of the thematic material of the movement—the heart of Glazunov is missing.

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