Fate Now Conquers

When 10-year-old Carlos Simon began spending his childhood Sunday mornings sitting at the piano and improvising gospel music for the congregation at his father’s small church outside Atlanta, no one could have envisioned where it would lead. Yet the inspiration provided by those experiences eventually led to a career in composition that has taken him to the world’s grandest concert halls, seen him working with the world’s finest orchestras, and brought him the recognition of a GRAMMY® nomination. Featured by The Washington Post as one of their “Composers and Performers to Watch in 2022,” Simon is the current composer-in-residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and also holds the title of composer chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the first in the institution’s 143-year history. His music has been performed by major orchestras, opera companies, and choruses the world over, and his album Requiem for the Enslaved was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The requiem is a multi-genre musical tribute commemorating the stories of 272 enslaved men, women, and children who were sold in 1838 by Georgetown University—the institution where Simon is now an associate professor.

Taught to play piano by ear, Simon’s weekly gospel improvisations in church were the formative experiences that led him to believe that music could make a difference in people’s lives. His wide-ranging works span genres from jazz to gospel to neo-Romanticism, and topics as disparate as Black womanhood, God’s presence, and George Floyd. Many of his works center on a positive response to struggle, including Fate Now Conquers, inspired by an 1815 journal entry from Beethoven’s notebook. In his journal, Beethoven quoted a passage from the 22nd book of the Iliad, in which Hector, having been mortally wounded by Achilles, utters the words, “Fate now conquers; I am hers. And yet not she shall share in my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit, and that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.” By 1815, Beethoven was almost completely deaf, yet he had resolved to continue to compose despite the disability. His preoccupation with the role of fate in his life is well documented, and Carlos Simon chose this concept of mankind’s futile struggle in the face of fate as the focus of this work.

The composer has provided the following notes on the piece:

“Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate. Jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona. Frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depicts the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.

“We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished to fate. Fate now conquers.”