Clara Schumann

The diary that Wieck (Clara's father) kept provides precise details of his highly disciplined teaching methods. During the first year of her instruction, he did not encourage her to learn to read music but rather to play be heart the small pieces he composed expressly for her use, piano music that encouraged the little girl to concentrate on physical position, musical phrasing, tone production and familiarity with the keyboard, aspects that accounted for the superb facility and ease at the instrument that she demonstrated to the end of her life.

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The young Felix Mendelssohn was the guest of honour at Clara's sixteenth birthday party on 13 Sept 1835 and presented her his newly composed Capriccio as a birthday present. At the height of the celebration, Clara performed the scherzo from Robert's new sonata at Mendelssohn's request. A few weeks after the birthday party, Frederic Chopin, now 25, arrived in Leipzig and spent an evening in the Wieck home. Robert Schumann was ecstatic to be with Chopin, his exact contemporary,.....

..... Concerto in A minor Op7, a work premiered in 1835 with Mendelssohn conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. At the premiere, both Clara and Mendelssohn broke with German performance tradition. She played from memory with her profile to the audience; he conducted with a baton facing the orchestra. Before this time, pianists always played from music in deference to the composer's notation and often performed with their backs to the audience, while conductors contrarily faced the audience and beat time noisily with whatever was in hand, objects ranging from a mace to a rolled parchment.

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.... she returned to Vienna to meet Franz Liszt and later confessed to Robert: "When I heard Liszt for the first time in Vienna, I hardly knew how to bear it, I sobbed aloud, it overcame me so." Early in Sept 1838, Clara returned to the stage of the Gewandhaus for a performance of Chopin's E minor Concerto and 3 piano transcriptions of Schubert songs by Franz Liszt, her new-found friend.

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In Paris Clara met Hector Berlioz, a great admirer of Robert's music. The celebrated composer quickly became her ally. .... .....
When both Erard and Pleyel, the leading piano manufacturers in Paris, placed their best pianos at her disposal, her concert life was again underway.