Unquestionably the circle of acquaintances Robert made during his first days in Leipzig was not large, though he was very happy to find his old friends from Zwickau, Dr. and Mrs. Carus. At their home he met some musicians of prominence—Heinrich Marschner, then conductor of the Leipzig Stadttheater; Gottlob Wiedebein, a song composer of some distinction at the time; and two people who, almost more than any others, were destined to play crucial roles in his life—the piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and his nine-year-old daughter, Clara, whom her father was assiduously grooming for a great artistic career.
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Wieck, in particular, was a rather extraordinary if unsympathetic person. He had had a difficult and impecunious youth, kept body and soul together by giving music lessons for a few pennies a week and subsisted largely on the bounty of friendly families who invited him, now and then, to a dinner of roast mutton and string beans. He aspired to become a minister, studied theology but preached no more than a trial sermon. He was something of a traveler and had been to Vienna, where he met Beethoven. The privations and troubles of his youth hardened his character. His first wife stood his spectacular tantrums for eight years, then obtained a divorce and married a Berlin musician named Bargiel. By this second marriage the mother of Clara Wieck had a son, Woldemar, who later made a name for himself as a composer.
Though a hard-boiled martinet and, as time went on, a tyrant of the first order, Wieck was not wholly without good qualities. His unscrupulous treatment of Schumann and his own daughter has made him the object of much historical obloquy, in the main abundantly justified. Yet he was a good teacher, for all his irascible, disputatious ways and his devotion to the artistic causes he believed in could be very genuine. From the first he appreciated Schumann’s creative talent and never concealed the fact, outrageously as he came to demean himself to the composer and Clara alike. Clara was, of course, her father’s most famous pupil. Yet he had others, notably his daughter by his second marriage, Marie, and Hans von Bülow. The qualities he aimed to cultivate in his pupils were, according to Clara, “the finest taste, the profoundest feeling and the most delicate hearing”. To this end he demanded that his students listen to great singers as much as possible and even learn to sing themselves.
Exactly a year after he had come to Leipzig Robert was off to Heidelberg there, ostensibly, to carry on his legal studies with Thibaut and another famous jurist, Mittermeier. Yet what chiefly busied him at Heidelberg was not jurisprudence but music. Under the teaching which, in Leipzig, he had begun to enjoy with Wieck he was developing into a first rate virtuoso and stirred all who heard him, especially by his fantastic skill in improvisation. Before long he was turning down invitations to concertize in places like Mannheim and Mainz. He practised tirelessly, played, composed, read, “poetized” and became one of the social lions of the neighborhood as well. Out of his old guardian, back in Zwickau, he wheedled money enough to defray the expenses of a summer jaunt to Italy. Shortly after his return he heard Paganini in Frankfort and reacted to the overwhelming impression in much the same manner as his contemporary, Liszt, and in an earlier day, Schubert. It was out of this revelation of diabolical virtuosity that his piano transcriptions of certain Paganini violin Caprices—overshadowed subsequently by those of Liszt—were to grow.
To his mother Robert confided little about his creative achievements in his Heidelberg days, the better to prepare her for the more remunerative plan he was forming of a virtuoso career. Yet in this period he conceived several works which were to become part of the foundations of his fame—things like the “Abegg” Variations, the “Papillons”, the superb, vertiginous Toccata. To be sure, the “Papillons” were only begun in Heidelberg and the Toccata revised several years later. A word, however, about the “Abegg” Variations, the composer’s Op. 1. The theme is one of those “alphabetical” inspirations he was to utilize even more imaginatively later on. That is to say it is based on the note succession A, B flat, E, G, G, and its inversion. Schumann had, indeed, known a flirtatious Meta Abegg in nearby Mannheim and had developed a tender feeling for her. Yet when he published the work he found it wiser to resort to mystification and so he dedicated it to an imaginary Countess Pauline von Abegg, who served the purpose just as well. The “Abegg” Variations, though unmistakable Schumann, have rather less than their creator’s subsequent technical ingenuity and seem more like outgrowths of the virtuoso principles of Hummel and Weber.
But the elaborate dreamings and light-hearted pleasures of Heidelberg could not go on forever. On July 30, 1830, Robert took the bull by the horns and confided to his mother that music, not law, was for weal or woe to be his destiny. Wieck was invited to settle the question. That awesome pedagogue wrote to the widow Schumann a long and circumstantial letter, larded with many an “if” and “but”. Having considered the problem from every angle he urged the good woman to yield to her son’s wish. Robert, so Wieck assured her, could under his training become one of the foremost pianists of the time. If the plan misfired he could always return to his legal studies.
To every intent the youth’s course was now clear and, for all time, he was freed from his nightmare. Back in Leipzig Robert took up his residence in the Wieck home, the quicker to pursue his pianistic studies. But in one thing he was less moderate than his teacher could have wished; he obstinately declined to make haste slowly. He would become a great pianist, yet he wanted a short cut to that goal. The idea of practising dull finger exercises for hours on end every day revolted him. Already in Heidelberg he had discussed with his friend, Töpken, a project for overcoming the weakness of the fourth finger. He found an excuse for breaking off his lessons with Wieck a little while and, with his fourth finger held up by some home-made contrivance, he practised furiously in solitude. Precisely what happened we do not know. The first intimation that something was amiss emanated from a letter written to his brother, Eduard, on June 14, 1832. Eduard is instructed to show this passage to his mother: “Eduard will inform you of the strange misfortune that has befallen me. This is the reason of a journey to Dresden which I am going to take with Wieck. Although I undertake it on the advice of my doctor and also for distraction I must do a good deal of work as well there”. Soon afterwards he wrote that his room “looked like an apothecary’s shop”. For years to come letters to one person or another speak of treatments and cures, prospects of improvement or stubborn developments which promise to futilize all his virtuoso ambitions. The long and the short of it was that Robert had so incurably lamed his right hand that for purposes of a public career it was as good as useless. After a fashion he could still play piano; but the particular glory to which he aspired was nipped in the bud.
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Who shall say that the accident was an unmitigated misfortune? Would Schumann have bequeathed us the treasures he did had he wandered incessantly over the map of Europe to gain the transient rewards of an itinerant pianist? Would his characteristic style of piano writing have been what it is? It has been surmised that certain distinctive traits of it are, directly or indirectly, the products of his self-made physical disability. And can we be sure that the nervous instability associated with the inherited illness of the entire Schumann line might not have struck him down even earlier, precipitated by the worries and strains to which an executant is forever subject? If Robert still wished to be a musician it had to be in a creative sense.