While Brahms is often associated with his powerful compositions for instruments, particularly his symphonies and chamber compositions, he also wrote some significant choral works. In addition to his well-known German Requiem, he composed several works for chorus and orchestra. Written in the summer of 1882, Song of the Fates (Gesang der Parzen), op. 89, was the last. The text of the work comes from Goethe's play Iphigenie auf Tauris, which Brahms had seen. A retelling of Euripedes’ Greek tragedy, the play tells the story of a dysfunctional family that might do well in today’s world of reality television: King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and their children Iphigenia, Electra, and Orestes. Iphigenia tells of the song of the Fates, or the goddesses of human destiny, relaying their cruel, cold behavior. Song of the Fates connects directly to Brahms's Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), written a little over a decade earlier for chorus and orchestra, not only in its Hellenic subject but also in similar messaging.

As scholar Heinz Becker writes of Brahms’s approach to Song of the Fates, “Brahms used an almost ascetic musical language with no florid sound-effects to capture the Mycean gloom of the ancient world.” The mood throughout the work is dramatic and foreboding, aided in no small part by Brahms’s division of the six-part chorus to emphasize the lower voices (SAATBB). The brooding orchestral introduction leads to a menacing choral opening incorporating a rhythmic motive (long-short-short) that later links to the concluding motive, “thus sang the fates.” While the work begins and ends in the minor mode, Brahms occasionally shifts to the major mode to express the text: for example, when the gods’ golden tables and stools, standing on cliffs and clouds, are described in stanzas two and four. Brahms approaches the words with broad strokes rather than subtleties, however, perhaps in keeping with the black-and-white nature of fate. Yet the musical drama is perfect. At the end of the text, as the “banished one” sits alone in a cave, thinking of his children and grandchildren and shaking his head, the orchestra gradually fades into nothing.