[Illustration:  Robert Schumann.]

Schumann had been invited by his friends, Dr. and Mrs. Carus, to an evening of music, and especially to hear the piano playing of a wonder-child—­a “musical fairy,” his hostess called her.  In the course of the evening he accompanied Frau Carus in some Schubert songs, when, chancing to look up, he saw a child dressed in white, her pretty face framed in dark hair, her expressive eyes raised toward the singer in rapt admiration.  The song over, and the applause having died away, he stepped up to the child, laid his hand kindly on her head, and asked, “Are you musical, too, little one?”

A curious smile played around her lips.  She was about to answer, when a man came to her and led her to the piano, and the first thing Schumann knew the shapely little hands struck into Beethoven’s F-minor Sonata and played it through with a firm, sure touch and fine musical feeling.  No wonder she had smiled at his question.

“Was I right in calling her a Musical fairy’?” asked Frau Carus of Schumann.

“Her face is like that of a guardian angel in a picture that hangs in my mother’s room at home,” was his reply.  Little he knew then that this child was destined to become his own good fairy and “guardian angel.”  Had he foreseen what she was to be to him, he could not more aptly have described her.  The most important immediate result of the meeting was that he became a pupil of her father, Friedrich Wieck, whose remarkable skill as a teacher had carried his daughter so far at such an early age.  The lessons stopped when Schumann went to Heidelberg to continue his studies, but he and Wieck, who was convinced of the young man’s musical genius, corresponded in a most friendly manner.

Clara, who was born in Leipsic in 1819, became her father’s pupil in her fifth year.  It is she who chiefly reflected glory upon him as a master, but, among his other pupils, Hans von Buelow became famous, and Clara’s half-sister Marie also was a noted pianist.  Wieck’s system was not a hard-and-fast one, but varied according to the individuality of each pupil.  He was to his day what Leschetizky, the teacher of Paderewski, is now.  Very soon after her meeting with Schumann, Clara made her public debut, and with great success.  Among those who heard and praised her highly during this first year of her public career was Paganini.

In 1830, two years after the first meeting of Robert and Clara, Schumann, his father having died, wrote to his mother and his guardian and begged them to allow him to choose a musical career, referring them to Wieck for an opinion as to his musical abilities.  The mother wrote to Wieck a letter which is highly creditable to her heart and judgment, and Wieck’s reply is equally creditable to him as a friend and teacher.  Evidently his powers of penetration led him to entertain the highest hopes for Schumann.  Among other things he writes that, with due diligence, Robert should in a few years become one of the greatest pianists of the day.  Why Wieck’s hopes in this particular were not fulfilled, and why, for this reason, Clara’s gifts as a pianist were doubly useful to Schumann, we shall see shortly.