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In fact, Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took up music as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a place among the major gods of creative art. Every one knows how he began to love Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and she entering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy.
He himself was personified under the dual form of Florestan and Eusebius, the "two souls in his breast" the former, the fiery iconoclast, impulsive in his judgments and reckless in attacking prejudices; the latter, the mild, genial, receptive dreamer. Master Raro, who stood for Wieck, also typified the calm, speculative side of Schumann's nature.
She decided to leave the decision concerning her son's future to Wieck, who, knowing Schumann's attainments and promise, voted for music. Schumann, wild with delight and ambition, fled from Heidelberg and the law. He went to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and he writes his mother, "If ever I marry, it will be an English girl."
Yet he writes in 1830 that he intends going to Weimar, "for the sly reason of being able to call myself a pupil of Hummel." Wieck, his father-in-law, he esteemed greatly as teacher and adviser, but it offended him deeply that Wieck should have followed the common error of estimating genius with a yard-stick, and asked where were his "Don Juan" and his "Freischütz?"
In the meanwhile, the Wiecks tried the same treatment upon Clara, whose singing-teacher, Carl Banck, had been deceived by her friendship into thinking that he could persuade her to love him. His ambition suited eminently the family politics of Father Wieck. He made his first mistake by slandering Schumann, not knowing the A B C of a woman's heart. For a lover slandered is twice recommended.
The desire to study with Wieck was inspired by the piano playing of his little daughter, Clara, then nine years old, who had already gained a considerable degree of musical culture and promised to make her mark as a pianist. Under his new teacher, Robert for the first time was obliged to study a rational system of technic and tone production.
Did Miss Wieck play my Etude well? Could she not select something better than just this etude, the least interesting for those who do not know that it is written for the black keys? In conclusion, I have nothing more to write, except to wish you good luck in the new house. Hide my manuscripts, that they may not appear printed before the time. If the Prelude is printed, that is Pleyel's trick.
He took piano lessons of her father, and became for a time an inmate of their house. He owed much to the teaching, but still more to the stimulating artistic society of the Wieck family. In 1829 he left his teacher, and made a final effort to prepare for the legal career that his mother had planned for him.
As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and his daughter kept together, "This marked a new era in piano music." At the age of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficult music ever written. But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching at home the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved.
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.
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