regular exposure to the best possible musical performances. In practice, however, he might not always have lived up to the ideals he described in the book Piano and Song: How to Teach, How To Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of Musical Performances. When Robert Schumann was living and studying in the Wieck household, he reported seeing Wieck punishing his nine-year-old son, Alwyn, for playing the violin poorly, tearing at his hair and yelling, "You wretch, you scoundrel, is this the way you try to please your father?" Clara seemed unconcerned at the violent scene. Shocked, Schumann wrote in his diary, "Am I among human beings?" Besides the book he published some studies and exercises for the piano, a number of pamphlets and substantial essays, In 1844 Wieck was again involved in managing Clara's career, but by March 1850 he was promoting the musical career not of Clara but of her sister, Marie, as well as the singer Minna "Schulz-Wieck," whom he falsely advertised as his daughter. Chopin Wieck published a very positive review of Frédéric Chopin's Variations on "La ci darem la mano" in the German periodical, Caecilia. Chopin found the review so embarrassingly gushing that he blocked Wieck's attempts to have the review published in French. In a letter to a friend, Chopin wrote that Wieck, "instead of being clever, is very stupid" and that he did not want his musical integrity to "die" because of "the imagination of that ... stubborn German." References External links Wieck Biography 1785 births 1873 deaths People from Bad Schmiedeberg German classical pianists Male classical pianists German music educators Piano pedagogues German music critics Robert Schumann People from the Electorate of Saxony 19th-century classical pianists 19th-century German musicians 19th-century male musicians German magazine founders