Ludwig Schuncke

In March 1822, aged only 11, he performed Johann Nepomuk Hummel's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.

[2] He went to Paris for study, where his main teachers were Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Anton Reicha and Henri Herz,[3] and where he also had friendships with people such as Hector Berlioz, Sigismond Thalberg and Johann Peter Pixis.

[1] He then moved to Vienna, Prague and Dresden, appearing in concert,[4] before finally settling in Leipzig in December 1833.

Schuncke was one of the co-founders of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,[7] and one of its early contributors, under the pseudonym "Jonathan".

[10] In one article, Schumann favourably compared the playing of the emerging Franz Liszt to that of Ludwig Schuncke.

In a letter dated 4 September 1834, Schumann wrote that his whole wealth could be summed up in three names: Henriette Voigt, Ernestine von Fricken and Ludwig Schuncke.

Schumann felt that Schuncke's heroic treatment was an inappropriate reflection of the tender nature of the Schubert piece, so he set out to approach his variations in a more intimate way, for piano solo.

[13] Schuncke helped Schumann through his crisis of 1833–34, in which he had a serious depressive illness leading to a suicide attempt, and his brother and sister-in-law both died.

[10] Schumann forever after kept Schuncke's death bed portrait in his own study, in a gallery of pictures hung above his piano.