Friedrich Wieck 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." When Robert Schumann was living and studying in the Wieck household, he reported seeing Wieck punishing his nine-year-old son, Alwyn, for playing the violin poorly, tearing at his hair and yelling, "You wretch, you scoundrel, is this the way you try to please your father?" Clara seemed unconcerned at the violent scene. Shocked, Schumann wrote in his diary, "Am I among human beings?" Besides the
Conrad Graf of standing up to the violence that Liszt inflicted on it during his more impassioned moments of playing. Friedrich Wieck wrote in his diary in during Liszt's 1838 visit to Vienna, "We heard Liszt today at Conrad Graf's who was sweating as his piano did not survive the great duel—Liszt remained the victor." Wieck described another concert on the same visit in which Liszt "destroyed" two Grafs, as well as an Erard piano lent to him by Sigismond Thalberg. In 1840, Graf gave one of his firm's grand pianos as a gift to the young piano virtuoso Clara Wieck (Friedrich's