Friedrich Wieck

[1] In 1800 he attended the Torgau gymnasium, where he received his only formal training in piano, six hours of lessons from Johann Peter Milchmeyer.

[2] He had little exposure to the wider world of music and he later developed his pedagogical theories by reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

[4] Spurred on by a favorable comment (also including harsh criticism) from Weber, he left his position as a tutor and established himself in Leipzig as a piano teacher and in the business of renting and selling pianos and other musical instruments and keeping a music lending library,[5] which Richard Wagner was known to use.

As an accomplished singer, Marianne Tromlitz sang at the well-known Gewandhaus in Leipzig on a weekly basis.

She daily received one-hour lesson (in piano, violin, singing, theory, harmony, composition, and counterpoint), and two hours of practice, using the teaching methods he had developed on his own.

One of the three children she gave birth to, besides Cäcilie and Clemens (1829–1833), who died at the age of four, Marie Wieck was also a concert pianist, although she was not as famous as was his first-born daughter.

Felix Mendelssohn supported his becoming professor of piano at the Leipzig Conservatory, although the post went to Ignaz Moscheles.

While including finger-stretching exercises to increase the student's span, he was careful to avoid fatigue by limiting the number of hours of practice per day and insisting on long walks and fresh air.

[11] In practice, however, he might not always have lived up to the ideals he described in the book Piano and Song: How to Teach, How To Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of Musical Performances.

[16] Wieck threatened that if Clara did not give up Robert, he would disinherit her, deprive her even of the money she had earned herself and tie the pair up in legal proceedings for 3–5 years.

Four days before the conference date, Wieck filed another appeal, an ugly, defamatory "declaration" to court objecting to the marriage, accusing Schumann of a litany of weaknesses and vices, especially habitual drunkenness and the inability to support a wife.

[18] Schumann "cannot speak coherently or write legibly," he is "lazy, unreliable, and conceited," "a mediocre composer whose music is unclear and almost impossible to perform," "incompetent, childish, unmanly, in short totally lost for any social adjustment.

[21] Striking an emotional blow against Clara, he began to promote the career of a rival female pianist, Camilla Pleyel.

Wieck invited Schumann to a reconciliation, writing, "For Clara's sake and the world's, we can no longer keep each other at a distance.

However, Schumann must have enjoyed the way Wieck treated him in his essays from 1844 on: as a first-grade model for art, beside Frederic Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles.

In a letter to a friend, Chopin wrote that Wieck, "instead of being clever, is very stupid" and that he did not want his musical integrity to "die" because of "the imagination of that ... stubborn German.