Writing of his 1823 visit to Beethoven, the London businessman Johann Reinhold Schultz noted, “He is a great admirer of the ancients. Homer, particularly his Odyssey, and Plutarch he prefers to all the rest; and, of the native poets, he studies Schiller and Goethe, in preference to any other.” Indeed, alongside Goethe, inarguably the 19th century’s greatest German poet, and Schiller, whose poem “An die Freude” Beethoven set in the transcendent finale of his Ninth Symphony, Homer occupied a place in Beethoven’s personal pantheon of great men of letters. He copied passages from the Odyssey and the Iliad into his diary, including this 1815 entry:

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.

—Iliad, Book XXII

The resonance of these words with the notoriously embattled Beethoven is not difficult to comprehend. They capture both the cosmic adversity he felt and the defiant spirit that would define his worldview, and characterize his art, at the dawn of the new century. “Your Beethoven is leading a very unhappy life,” he confided to a friend upon recognizing the onset of deafness, “and is at variance with Nature and his Creator.” Yet, at the nadir of despair, the composer declared, “I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely.”

Beethoven’s spiritual resilience and artistic determination animate American composer Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers, a tightly compressed paean to the indomitability of the human will. A composer active in both concert and film music, Simon injects a riveting cinematic energy into this five-minute orchestral score, rife with slashing melodic fragments and wild arpeggios, roiling atop a persistent, anxious rhythmic pulse.

Fate Now Conquers is among a series of works commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra from Composer-in-Residence Gabriela Lena Frank and alumni of her Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), to reflect on Beethoven’s legacy as part of the Orchestra’s celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday. The work was to have received its world premiere in March 2020, on a program with Beethoven’s Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies, but those concerts were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece finally received its world premiere on a Digital Stage concert in October 2020, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Tonight’s performance marks the first time The Philadelphia Orchestra will play it in front of a live audience.

Simon is a 2017 GLFCAM Composer Fellow. He earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers, and also received degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College. Additionally, he studied in Baden, Austria, at the Hollywood Music Workshop, and at New York University’s Film Scoring Summer Workshop. As part of the Sundance Institute, he was named a Sundance Institute and Time Warner Foundation Artist Fellow in 2018. His string quartet, Elegy, honoring the lives of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, was recently performed at the Kennedy Center for the Mason Bates JFK Jukebox Series. Other recent accolades include being a composer fellow at the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, winning the Underwood Emerging Composer Commission from the American Composers Orchestra, the Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award, and the Presser Award from the Theodore Presser Foundation. Recent commissions have come from Washington National Opera, the Reno Philharmonic, and Morehouse College in celebration of its 150th anniversary. A former member of the music faculty at Spelman College and Morehouse College, he now serves as assistant professor at Georgetown University. 

Fate Now Conquers unfolds breathlessly as a single thrilling scene, as if capturing an intricate action sequence in one take. After the work’s opening orchestral salvo—a fusillade of repeated notes in the violins and violas, pianissimo, agitato, punctuated by fist-shaking timpani strikes and muted trumpets—the woodwinds and cellos whisper a mysterious melodic fragment. This sequence of descending thirds, borrowed from the enigmatic introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, here achieves an ominous sonic effect, underpinned by the nervous moto perpetuo in the strings and brass.

Simon additionally invokes the Allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. The composer explains: “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.”

Colossal brass chords power the music through the score’s central march-like sequence. These grow increasingly dissonant; turbulent woodwind triplet figures, fortissimo and ferocious, further amplify the Beethovenian Sturm und Drang. A swirl of rising and falling scales set in high voices—flutes, clarinets, violins, absent the gravitational pull of cellos and basses—conjures leaves twisting helplessly in the wind. A plaintive cello solo sets the work on a path toward its inevitable final cadence.

—Patrick Castillo

Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, Eleonora M. Beck, Patrick Castillo, and/or Luke Howard.