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
Friedrich Wieck for 18 days for unruly courtroom behaviour, although it is not clear whether he actually served the sentence. Clara and Robert married on September 12, 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. For several months Wieck refused to release to Clara the piano from the Wieck home on which she had played since childhood; finally he was forced to do so by court order. By 1843 Wieck was a grandfather, Clara having given birth to the first two of her eight children, and Schumann was winning a growing reputation as a serious composer. Wieck invited Schumann to a reconciliation, writing,