Raised in Atlanta as the son of a preacher, GRAMMY-nominated composer Carlos Simon grew up in a household where the only music that was not forbidden was gospel. The genre’s improvisatory style had a critical impact on his composition, along with the music of Beethoven and Brahms. The current Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Simon frequently composes for the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera. Recent noteworthy premieres include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Brooklyn Art Song Society, and Minnesota Orchestra—the latter a large-scale tribute to George Floyd and the ongoing movement for racial justice. A “young composer on the rise, with an ear for social justice” (NPR), Simon’s latest album, Requiem for the Enslaved, is a musical tribute to the 272 enslaved men, women, and children Georgetown University sold in 1838, and was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

According to Simon, it was Beethoven who inspired Fate Now Conquers. As he explains,

This piece was inspired by a journal entry from Ludvig 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 depict 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.