ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Ignatz Moscheles.

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Did we pronounce that right? Eh, probably not.

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Based on information from the passage, how did Schumann meet his wife?

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If we're not totally sure about this one, we might have to go back and reread the passage a bit.

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One trick is to use the dates given to us to quickly zoom in on the places we need to fact check.

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Dates stand out from all the words in the passage, so it's easy to go straight to

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them without having to do a lot of rereading.

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And you thought you'd never be happy to see numbers...

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Using our patented date-zoom method, we can swiftly eliminate choice (B).

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The passage clearly tells us that the big event for little Schumann was seeing a performance

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by the amazing pianist Ignatz Moscheles.

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Now it's time to apply our date-zoom method to choice (A).

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This takes us to line 61, which tells us that 1844 was the year that Schumann and his pianist

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wife, Clara, kicked off a big European tour. It'd be pretty weird if they hadn't met before this.

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Really weird. We're sure we can take (A) out of the running.

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So now we're down to choices (C) or (D).

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If we skim back from line 61, we see that line 54 tells us that Clara Wieck <<veek>>

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was the daughter of Schumann's piano teacher, who he would one day make his wife.

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This proves (C) is the right answer, knocking (D) out of the running.

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That's a good two-for-one deal: piano lessons and a wife.

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