Born in 1986 in Washington, D.C., where he currently resides
Fate Now Conquers
Composed: 2019
Estimated length: 5 minutes
First performance: October 8, 2020, in a virtual performance with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work.
Carlos Simon is part of a generation that is shedding needed new light on classical tradition from perspectives that have been marginalized by that very tradition. In the process, he has become one of today’s most sought-after American composers. This season, Simon began his first year as the inaugural Composer Chair with the Boston Symphony and has also extended his contract as composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C. Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will premiere Simon’s latest large-scale work later this spring: a multimedia Gospel-inspired setting of the Catholic Mass titled Good News Mass.
In Fate Now Conquers, his most widely performed work, Simon directs his attention to the very center of classical tradition: “I wanted to pay homage to Beethoven but yet remain true to my artistic voice.” The piece originated when composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who was engaged in a residency with the Philadelphia Orchestra, asked Simon to write a piece responding to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which was to be performed as part of a complete cycle during the German composer’s 250th-anniversary year in 2020.
Simon chose his title from an entry in one of Beethoven’s notebooks dated 1815. The entry quotes a passage from Book 22 of the Iliad: “But 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.”
This striking extract calls into question the familiar picture of Beethoven as a defiant rebel, intent on seizing fate “by the throat.” By 1815, he had composed eight of his nine symphonies and was entering into an especially difficult personal period that would have ramifications for his late style—including for the Ninth Symphony.
For Simon, the image of Beethoven struggling with his demons and obstacles conjured musical ideas to suggest “the unpredictable ways of fate: jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every person; frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depicting the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Fate Now Conquers reconsiders the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony—music that made such an impression on its very first audience in 1813 that they demanded an encore. Simon’s compact, expressively orchestrated piece reimagines the rhythmic and harmonic components of the Beethoven movement in a new context.
“We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments,” writes Simon. “Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished himself to fate. Fate now conquers.”
Scored for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Beethoven's Ninth: Ode to Joy — February 6 to 8, 2024
Nashville Symphony & Chorus
Nicholas Hersh, conductor
Tucker Biddlecombe, chorus director
Ellie Dehn, soprano
Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo soprano
Alek Shrader, tenor
David Leigh, bass
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