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 from the Nazi racist categories of half-, quarter- or smaller fractions of Jewishness. Following promulgation of the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Wieck and his sister were categorized, not as Mischlinge (mixed race), but as "Geltungsjuden" ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the Holocaust. After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 the Wiecks experienced the gradual ramping-up of anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. First they were ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. Later they were later forbidden to attend classes at all. In 1938 Miriam was sent to a boarding school