Friedrich Kalkbrenner seriously intended to become Kalkbrenner's pupil, but he changed his mind after this encounter with the celebrated man: Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann, and herself an eminent pianist and composer, spent several months in Paris during the year 1839. She met many of the Parisian pianists, Kalkbrenner among them. In a letter home to her father, piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, she wrote: German poet and satirist Heinrich Heine in his "Letters on Music from Paris (1840–47)" wrote with biting wit on musical life and musicians in the French capital. Kalkbrenner was the target of some of Heine’s more
Michael Wieck in Scotland in a "Kindertransporte", taking the place of another German-Jewish girl who had gone to the United States. Thus, she survived the war. Shortly thereafter, young Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. In mid-1941 Wieck celebrated his Bar Mitzva in the small Orthodox synagogue "Adass Jisroel", as the main Jewish synogogue of Königsberg had been destroyed in the Nazi ""Kristallnacht"" pogrom of November 1938. During the pogrom perpetrators vandalized the interior of the Orthodox synagogue hall, but spared it from arson because it was housed in a residential building. Later the congregation restored a prayer hall in