efforts. Though he never allowed the desire for popularity to
influence his work, yet he occasionally craves appreciation. "I am
willing to confess that I should be greatly pleased if I could succeed
in composing something which would impel the public, after hearing you
play it, to run against the walls in their delight; for vain we
composers are, even though we have no reason to be so." It must have
given him a strange shock when an amateur asked him, at one of his
wife's concerts in Vienna, if he also was musical!

In her efforts to win appreciation for her husband, Clara was nobly
assisted by Liszt. Just like Wagner, Schumann was not at first very
favorably impressed with Liszt, owing to the sensational flavor of his
early performances. But he soon changed his mind, especially when
Liszt played some of his (Schumann's) compositions. "Many things were
different from my conception of them, but always '_genial_,' and
marked by a tenderness and boldness of expression which even he
presumably has not at his command every day. Becker was the only other
person present, and he had tears in his eyes." And two days later:
"But I must tell you that Liszt appears to me grander every day. This
morning he again played at Raimund Härtel's, in a way to make us all
tremble and rejoice, some études of Chopin, a number of the Rossini
soirées, and other things." Of other contemporary pianists Hummel,
"ten years behind the time," and Thalberg, whom he liked better as
pianist than as composer, are alluded to. Yet he writes in 1830 that
he intends going to Weimar, "for the sly reason of being able to _call
myself_ a pupil of Hummel." Wieck, his father-in-law, he esteemed
greatly as teacher and adviser, but it offended him deeply that Wieck
should have followed the common error of estimating genius with a
yard-stick, and asked where were his "Don Juan" and his "Freischütz?"
His enthusiasm for Schubert, Chopin, and especially for Bach, finds