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A German, like the eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller, and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck and all Germans, generally speaking.
In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It is easy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara." She was still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used to frighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his "Doppelgänger," a name, Clara afterwards took to herself.
Robert on hearing his decision was wild with joy. He wrote an exuberant letter to Wieck promising to be most submissive as a piano pupil and saying "whole pailfuls of very very cold theory can do me no harm and I will work at it without a murmur. I give myself up wholly to you." With a heart full of hope, young Schumann returned to Leipsic, which he had gladly left more than a year before.
But I will squeeze myself right into a corner, bury my face in the cushions, and think only of you. Farewell, my Clara. "Your ROBERT." Close upon this letter, which must have been answered with no hesitation and no inferiority of passion, came the summons to battle for the prize. Wieck, who had been a cordial father, declined with undue enthusiasm the rôle of father-in-law.
The poet Grillparzer spoke of her as "the innocent child who first unlocked the casket in which Beethoven buried his mighty heart," and it must be confessed that Clara Wieck, even as a young girl, did more than any other pianist to develop a love of and appreciation for the music of the Titan of composers.
Wieck evidently had remained in ignorance of the young people's attachment, for, when on Clara's birthday the following year Schumann made formal application in writing for her hand, her father gave an evasive answer, and on the suit being pressed, he, who had been almost like a second father to Robert, became his bitter enemy.
Previously, however, he had spent a year in the household of Frederick Wieck, the distinguished teacher of music. So much he had exacted before succumbing to maternal pleading. At this time he first made the acquaintance of a charming and precocious child, Clara Wieck, who played such an important part in his future life.
He did become engaged to her, but the following year the engagement was dissolved; and soon after this he discovered that his artistic admiration for Clara Wieck had assumed the form of love. Although her father opposed their union several years, on account of Schumann's poverty, the young couple often met, and not only in the music-room.
There can surely be no dispute that Robert Schumann was one of the most original and individual of composers, and one of the broadest and deepest-minded musicians in the history of the art. Nor can there be any doubt that Clara Wieck was one of the richest dowered musicians who ever shed glory upon her sex.
Old Wieck stooped to everything, and even told Clara that he had written to Ernestine to demand a statement that she fully released Schumann from his former engagement to her it being remembered that among Germans a betrothal always used to be almost as difficult a bond to sever as a marriage tie.
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