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 days before the conference date, Wieck filed another appeal, an ugly, defamatory "declaration" to court objecting to the marriage, accusing Schumann of a litany of weaknesses and vices, especially habitual drunkenness and the inability to support a wife. Schumann "cannot speak coherently or write legibly," he is "lazy, unreliable, and conceited," "a mediocre composer whose music is unclear and almost impossible to perform," "incompetent, childish, unmanly, in short totally lost for any social adjustment." Some of the information he used was obtained by breaking into Clara's locked letter-box. The court did not issue a judgment for several months. Wieck took