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However far the affair may or may not have progressed at this time, there was a curious interruption during the following year. Robert appears to have temporarily lost his heart to a certain Ernestine von Fricken, a young lady of sixteen, who was one of Wieck's pupils. Clara consoled herself by permitting a musician named Banck to pay her attention.
The first thing I did was, of course, to send a copy into the north to a girl who is still a child, and who will dance with glee at the idea that she is engaged to a Doctor." But Wieck's refusal to sanction the marriage could not be altered. In fact, his opposition became even stronger and more determined.
Why Wieck's hopes in this particular were not fulfilled, and why, for this reason, Clara's gifts as a pianist were doubly useful to Schumann, we shall see shortly. Schumann entered with enthusiasm upon the career of his choice. He left Heidelberg and took lodgings with the Wiecks in Leipsic.
Ernestine, like Robert, was a pupil and boarder at the home of the Wiecks. She and Robert had acted as godparents to one of Wieck's children, possibly Clara's half-sister, Marie, also in later years a prominent pianist and teacher. The affair with Ernestine grew more serious. In 1834 he wrote a letter of somewhat formal and timid devotion to her.
Schumann busied himself in so many ways that again for a little while he somewhat melted Wieck's wrath, and Clara hoped that some day he could again be received at home as a friend. She was made the court pianist at this time, and it was a quaint whimsy of fate that, in connection with the award, Schumann was asked to give her father a "character."
With this letter he enclosed one to Wieck's wife: "In your hands, dear lady, I lay our future happiness, and in your heart no stepmotherly heart, I am sure." The letter made a sensation in the Wieck home. Clara's father spoke no word to her about it. He and his wife locked themselves up in a room to answer it. Clara wept alone all the long birthday.
Clara, who was born in Leipsic in 1819, became her father's pupil in her fifth year. It is she who chiefly reflected glory upon him as a master, but, among his other pupils, Hans von Bülow became famous, and Clara's half-sister Marie also was a noted pianist. Wieck's system was not a hard-and-fast one, but varied according to the individuality of each pupil.
As time passed however, he made less and less use of these fanciful images until they finally seemed to fade out of his mind. An important event of 1834, was Schumann's acquaintance with Ernestine von Fricken, who came to Leipsic from the little town of Asch, on the Bohemian border. She lived at the Wiecks', expecting to become a pianist under Papa Wieck's tuition.
Through this accident he was unable to introduce his own piano works to the public, so that the importance of the service rendered him by Clara, in taking his compositions into her repertoire, both before and after their marriage, was doubled. One evening at Wieck's, Schumann was anxious to hear some new Chopin works which he had just received.
The name of Chopin brings me back to Wieck's prophecy regarding Schumann as a pianist. The latter in his enthusiasm devised an apparatus for finger gymnastics which he practised so assiduously that he strained one of his fingers and permanently impaired his technique, making a pianistic career an impossibility.
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