Elizabeth Subercaseaux Elizabeth Subercaseaux Elizabeth Subercaseaux Sommerhoff (born 1945) is a Chilean journalist and writer. Elizabeth Subercaseaux grew up near Cauqenes, Chile at her grandparents' home called Santa Clara. Subercaseaux's father died in 1956, when he was 42 years old and she was 11. The five children of the marriage – Bernardo and Juan, older than Elizabeth, and Martin and Ximena, younger – were brought up by their mother, the sculptor, painter, and photographer Gerda Sommerhoff, who was born in Germany and grew up in Holland. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck. After finishing high
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,