The true woman in the case makes her entree in this innocent style: 

“Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.

“James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.”

This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters preserved for many years by Haydn.  His answers to them seem to have been lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn’s letters to this interesting personage.  May we be there to see!

Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy.  In that year there came to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe made love and wrote poetry.  He became music-master to the English queen as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as “the English Bach.”  He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of London society.  But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a son-in-law quite another.  When, therefore, he made one of his most aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was, according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape notoriety.  Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of consumption.

Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in London, and is taken up by society.  Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat.  Just as before, she becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer.  But whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.

Dies quoted Haydn’s own words as saying, “In London, I fell in love with a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time.”  But Mr. Krehbiel shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.  To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not “though she was sixty years old,” but “though I was sixty years old.”  I think we are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics, as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times of their most potent beauty.