music requires to be publicly performed by a sympathetic interpreter before receiving its meed of merit.  Schumann had hoped to be his own interpreter.  He saw that hope vanish, but a lovely being came to his aid.  She saw his works come into life; their creation was part of her own existence; she fathomed his genius to its utmost depths; her whole being vibrated in sympathy with his, and when she sat down at the piano and pressed the keys, it was as though he himself were the performer.  She was his fingers—­fingers at once deft and delicate.  She played with a double love—­love for him and love for his music.  And why should she not love it?  She was as much the mother of his music as of his children.  I have already indicated that Clara probably developed early.  At all events, there are letters from Schumann to her, at fourteen, which leave no doubt that he was in love with her then, or that she could have failed to perceive this.  In one of these letters he proposes this highly poetic, not to say psychological, method of communicating with her.  “Promptly at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning,” he writes, “I will play the Adagio from the Chopin variations and will think strongly—­in fact only—­of you.  Now I beg of you that you will do the same, so that we may meet and see each other in spirit. . . .  Should you not do this, and there break to-morrow at that hour a chord, you will know that it is I.”

[Illustration:  Clara Schumann at the piano.]

However far the affair may or may not have progressed at this time, there was a curious interruption during the following year.  Robert appears to have temporarily lost his heart to a certain Ernestine von Fricken, a young lady of sixteen, who was one of Wieck’s pupils.  Clara consoled herself by permitting a musician named Banck to pay her attention.  For reasons which never have been clearly explained, Schumann suddenly broke with Ernestine and turned with renewed ardor to Clara, while Clara at once withdrew her affections from Banck and retransferred them to Schumann.  We find him writing to her again in 1835: 

“Through all the Autumn festivals there looks out an angel’s head that closely resembles a certain Clara who is very well known to me.”  By the following year, Clara then being seventeen, things evidently had gone so far that, between themselves, they were engaged.  “Fate has destined us for each other,” he writes to her.  “I myself knew that long ago, but I had not the courage to tell you sooner, nor the hope to be understood by you.”

Wieck evidently had remained in ignorance of the young people’s attachment, for, when on Clara’s birthday the following year (1837) Schumann made formal application in writing for her hand, her father gave an evasive answer, and on the suit being pressed, he, who had been almost like a second father to Robert, became his bitter enemy.  Clara, however, remained faithful to her lover through the three years of unhappiness which her father’s sudden hatred of Robert caused them.  In 1839 she was in Paris, and from there she wrote to her father: