Clara Schumann at the age of nine, Clara Wieck performed at the Leipzig home of Dr. Ernst Carus, director of the mental hospital at Colditz Castle. There, she met another gifted young pianist who had been invited to the musical evening, Robert Schumann, who was nine years older. Schumann admired Clara's playing so much that he asked permission from his mother to stop studying law, which had never interested him much, and take music lessons with Clara's father. While taking lessons, he rented a room in the Wieck household, staying about a year. He would sometimes dress up as a ghost and
Friedrich Wieck German periodical, "Caecilia". Chopin found the review so embarrassingly cloying that he blocked Wieck's attempts to publish the review in French. 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." Friedrich Wieck Johann Gottlob Friedrich Wieck (18 August 1785 – 6 October 1873, aged 88) was a noted German piano teacher, voice teacher, owner of a piano store, and music reviewer. He is remembered as the teacher of his daughter, Clara, a