Carlos Simon was born in Washington, DC, on April 13, 1986. The first performance of Fate Now Conquers took place at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 26, 2020. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra. Fate Now Conquers is scored for piccolo, flute, two oboes, two clarinets in B-flat, two bassoons, two horns in F, two trumpets in C (harmon mute), timpani, and strings. Approximate performance time is five minutes.
Carlos Simon was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Atlanta. Simon earned degrees at Georgia State University, Morehouse College, and the University of Michigan. Previously a faculty member at Atlanta’s Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Carlos Simon is currently Associate Professor at Georgetown University. Simon is Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he frequently contributes to the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera. Carlos Simon is also the Composer Chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the first to hold that title in the BSO’s 143-year history.
Simon’s orchestral work Fate Now Conquers was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Those artists performed the work’s world premiere on March 26, 2020.
The composer provides the following program notes on Fate Now Conquers:
This piece was inspired by a journal entry from Ludwig van Beethoven’s notebook written in 1815: “Iliad. The Twenty-Second Book 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.”
Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th 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.
-Carlos Simon