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 capital of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is the son of two Königsberg musicians who were widely known before the Nazi era, Kurt Wieck and Hedwig Wieck-Hulisch. They were founders of the popular "Königsberger Streichquartett" (Königsberg String Quartet). After consultation with a local rabbi, his Jewish mother and his nominally Protestant, but in religious matters indifferent, father decided to bring up their children, Michael and his sister, Miriam (born 1925), as Jews and enrolled them with the Jewish congregation in Königsberg. According to Jewish religious law a person born from a Jewish mother is Jewish by birth. This differs