ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by child prodigies. Making everybody else

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feel that much worse about themselves.

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According to the passage, when did Schumann first display an interest in playing the piano?

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Okay, so we need a decent understanding of just when and where Schumann caught the music bug.

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Unfortunately, we can't go to the video footage. We can definitely get rid of (C).

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We remember the passage telling us that Frederick Wieck <<veek>>, Schumann's second piano teacher,

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far outclassed his first old, pedantic one.

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Even though Wieck was apparently better than the first guy, the first guy was...well...first.

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Therefore (C) can go by the wayside.

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Let's see what (B) has to offer.

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Hm, well, the passage says that Schumann was 7 or 8 when he wrote his first songs, so unless

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he was a crazy genius at his other subjects--which he wasn't...

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We're sure he wasn't already in high school by then. (B) is wrong-O.

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(D) is obviously incorrect as well, since the passage goes into lots of detail about

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how Schuman got started.

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This leaves us with (A), which totally works. Since he started composing his first tunes

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when he was seven or eight, it definitely puts him in elementary school range.

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Want to hear the song we composed when we were 7?

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Yeah, so where's our induction into the Classical Music Hall of Fame?

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