“Ernestine has written to me in great delight.  She has sounded her father by means of her mother; and he gives her to me!  Henrietta, he gives her to me! do you understand that?  And yet I am so wretched; it seems as though I feared to accept this jewel, lest it should be in unworthy hands.  If you ask me to put a name to my grief I cannot do it.  I think it is grief itself; but alas, it may be love itself, and mere longing for Ernestine.  I really cannot stand it any longer, so I have written to her to arrange a meeting one of these days.  If you should ever feel thoroughly happy, then think of two souls who have placed all that is most sacred to them in your keeping, and whose future happiness is inseparably bound up with your own.”

This Madame Voigt, who died at the age of thirty-one, once said that on a beautiful summer evening, she and Schumann, after playing various music, had rowed out in a boat, and, shipping the oars, had sat side by side in complete silence—­that deathlike silence which so often enveloped Schumann even in the circles of his friends at the taverns.  When they returned after a mute hour, Schumann pressed her hand and exclaimed, “Today we have understood each other perfectly.”

It was under Ernestine’s inspiration, which Schumann called “a perfect godsend,” that he fashioned the various jewels that make up the music of his “Carneval,” using for his theme the name of Ernestine’s birthplace, “Asch,” which he could spell in music in two ways:  A-ES-C-H, or AS-C-H, for ES is the German name for E flat, while AS is our A flat and H our B natural.  He was also pleased to note that the letters S-C-H-A were in his own name.

While all this flirtation and loving and getting betrothed was going on in the home of Wieck, there was another member of the same household, another pupil of the same teacher, who was not deriving so much delight from the arrangement.  Through it all, a great-eyed, great-hearted, greatly suffering little girl of fifteen was learning, for the first time, sorrow.  This was Clara Wieck, who was already electrifying the most serious critics and captivating the most cultured audiences by the maturity of her art, already winning an encore with a Bach fugue,—­an unheard-of miracle.  As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and his daughter kept together, “This marked a new era in piano music.”  At the age of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficult music ever written.

But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching at home the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved.  Can’t you see her now in her lonely room, reeling off from under her fleet fingers the dazzling arpeggios, while the tears gather in her eyes and fall upon her hands?

Four years later she could write to Schumann: