She was clever, too, and through her concert tours was seeing much of the world for those days.  In Weimar she played for Goethe, the great poet himself getting a cushion for her and placing it on the piano stool in order that she might sit high enough; and not only praising her playing, but also presenting her with his likeness in a medallion.  The poet Grillparzer, after hearing her play in Vienna Beethoven’s F-minor Sonata, wrote a delightful poem.  “Clara Wieck and Beethoven’s F-minor Sonata.”  It tells how a magician, weary of life, locked all his charms in a shrine, threw the key into the sea, and died.  In vain men tried to force open the shrine.  At last a girl, wandering by the strand and watching their vain efforts, simply dipped her white fingers into the sea and drew forth the key, with which she opened the shrine and released the charms.  And now the freed spirits rise and fall at the bidding of their lovely, innocent mistress, who guides them with her white fingers as she plays.  The imagery of this tribute to Clara’s playing is readily understood.  In Paris she heard Chopin and Mendelssohn.  All these experiences tended to her early development, and there is little wonder if Schumann saw her older than she really was.

In 1834 Schumann’s early literary tastes asserted themselves, but now in connection with music.  He founded the “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” which under his editorship soon became one of the foremost musical periodicals of the day.  Among his own writings for it is the enthusiastic essay on one of Chopin’s early works, in which Schumann, as he did later in the case of Brahms, discovered the unmistakable marks of genius.  The name of Chopin brings me back to Wieck’s prophecy regarding Schumann as a pianist.  The latter in his enthusiasm devised an apparatus for finger gymnastics which he practised so assiduously that he strained one of his fingers and permanently impaired his technique, making a pianistic career an impossibility.  Through this accident he was unable to introduce his own piano works to the public, so that the importance of the service rendered him by Clara, in taking his compositions into her repertoire, both before and after their marriage, was doubled.

One evening at Wieck’s, Schumann was anxious to hear some new Chopin works which he had just received.  Realizing that his lame finger rendered him incapable of playing, he called out despairingly: 

“Who will lend me fingers?”

“I will,” said Clara, and sat down and played the pieces for him.  She “lent him her fingers;” and that is precisely what she did for him through life in making his piano and chamber music compositions known.  Familiarity with Schumann’s music enables us of to-day to appreciate its beauty.  But for its day it was, like Brahms’ music later, of a kind that makes its way slowly.  Left to the general musical public, it probably would have been years in sinking into their hearts.  Such