composer who had so long been his pupil and a member of his family circle.  The father of Clara looked forward to a brilliant artistic career for his daughter, perhaps hoped to marry her to some serene highness, and Schumann’s prospects were as yet very uncertain.  So he took Clara on a long artistic journey through Germany, with a view of quenching this passion by absence and those public adulations which he knew Clara’s genius would command.  But nothing shook the devotion of her heart, and she insisted on playing the compositions of the young composer at her concerts, as well as those of Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin, the latter two of whom were just beginning to be known and admired.

Hoping to overcome Papa Wieck’s opposition by success, Schumann took his new journal to Vienna, and published it in that city, carrying on simultaneously with his editorial duties active labors in composition.  The attempt to better his fortunes in Vienna, however, did not prove very successful, and after six months he returned again to Leipzig.  Schumann’s generous sympathy with other great musicians was signally shown in his very first Vienna experiences, for he immediately made a pious pilgrimage to the Waehring cemetery to offer his pious gift of flowers on the graves of Beethoven and Schubert.  On Beethoven’s grave he found a steel pen, which he preserved as a sacred treasure, and used afterward in writing his own finest musical fancies.  He remembered, too, that the brother of Schubert, Ferdinand, was still living in a suburb of Vienna.  “He knew me,” Schumann says, “from my admiration for his brother, as I had publicly expressed it, and showed me many things.  At last he let me look at the treasures of Franz Schubert’s compositions, which he still possesses.  The wealth that lay heaped up made me shudder with joy, what to take first, where to cease.  Among other things, he also showed me the scores of several symphonies, of which many had never been heard, while others had been tried, but put back, on the score of their being too difficult and bombastic.”  One of these symphonies, that in C major, the largest and grandest in conception, Schumann chose and sent to Leipzig, where it was soon afterward produced under Mendelssohn’s direction at one of the Ge-wandhaus concerts, and produced an immediate and profound sensation.  For the first time the world witnessed, in a more expanded sphere, the powers of a composer the very beauties of whose songs had hitherto been fatal to his general success.  During this period of Schumann’s life the most important works he composed were the “Etudes Symphoniques,” the famous “Carnival” dedicated to Liszt, the “Scenes of Childhood,” the “Fantasia” dedicated to Liszt, the “Novellettes,” and “Kreisleriana.”  As he writes to Heinrich Dorn:  “Much music is the result of the contest I am passing through for Clara’s sake.”  Schumann’s compositions had been introduced to the public by the gifted interpretation of Clara Wieck, with whom it was a labor of love,