I Will Seize Fate By The

Written in a letter to his friend and physician Franz Wegeler on 16 November 1801, as Beethoven confronted the advancing deafness he had been concealing from the world for two years. The full passage reads: "I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely." This same letter mentions experimental treatments his doctors had prescribed and an unspoken romantic attachment, possibly to Julie Guicciardi, to whom he dedicated the Moonlight Sonata.