Robert Schumann and Mary Potts

Robert Schumann's Bunte Blätter, published in December 1851 as Opus 99, is dedicated to "Miss Mary Potts." This American woman—unidentified in the Schumann literature—is here revealed to be the daughter of the well-known Presbyterian minister, the Rev. George E. Potts, the apparently gifted pupil of Schumann's student and colleague Otto Dresel, and the wife of the wealthy Louisiana lawyer and legislator John Perkins, Jr. Mary Potts (1827–1858) is thus "Die Amerikanerin Mad. Perkins" mentioned in Schumann's diary for October 1850. The overlapping stories of her marriage to Perkins in New York, her encounter with Schumann in Düsseldorf (while on her honeymoon), her flight from her husband in Paris, and her abbreviated career as a cultured young woman in antebellum America, are recounted here on the basis of divorce proceedings, articles in the contemporary press, and information provided by living descendents of the Potts family.