A Prodigy's Father
He did everything to be known as father of a child prodigy, a piano virtuoso. Clara Schumann was his second born and her musical education was planned down to the smallest detail. She daily received one-hour lesson (in piano, violin, singing, theory, harmony, composition, and counterpoint), and two hours of practice, using the teaching methods he had developed on his own. He was accompanying her on the tours throughout Europe. His wife gave birth to another two children, Alwyn and Gustav. The differences between Wieck and his wife, Marianne, were irreconcilable in large part due to Wieck’s unyielding nature. When his friend Adolph Bargiel, father of Woldemar Bargiel, had an affair with her, she divorced Wieck in 1824. She then married Adolph Bargiel.
His second wife became a twenty years his junior - Clementine Fechner - whom he married in 1828. One of the three children she gave birth to, besides Cäcilie and Clemens, Marie Wieck was also a concert pianist, although she was not as famous as was his first born daughter. In 1844, he moved to Dresden, where he lived for the rest of his life, spending the summers at Loschwitz, where he died in 1873.
Read more about this topic: Friedrich Wieck
Famous quotes containing the word father:
“[My father] was a lazy man. It was the days of independent incomes, and if you had an independent income you didn’t work. You weren’t expected to. I strongly suspect that my father would not have been particularly good at working anyway. He left our house in Torquay every morning and went to his club. He returned, in a cab, for lunch, and in the afternoon went back to the club, played whist all afternoon, and returned to the house in time to dress for dinner.”
—Agatha Christie (1891–1976)