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 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,