Her name was Mary de Senger. She played him Bach's Italian Concerto as her audition piece. He said just two words: “Quite perfect.” They then played piano duets together and presumably exchanged pleasantries of some kind. Then they had sex. And then she took the evening train home to Geneva, with Schoeck following, also by train, the next morning.

Mary was the daughter of the Bavarian composer, conductor, and pedagogue Hugo von Senger (1835–92), who had settled in Geneva in 1869. He had assimilated swiftly, his “von” becoming a “de.” For the next twenty-three years of his life he was the dominant figure in the music life of his adopted city. Hugo numbered some of the most notable men of the time among his acquaintances, including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Nietzsche. It was while visiting him in 1876 that Nietzsche met and proposed to one of de Senger's pupils, one Mathilde Trampedach. She refused and later married her teacher instead, becoming his third, and last, wife (the incident was later immortalized by Thomas Mann when he used it as the basis for the love triangle of Adrian Leverkühn/Marie Godeau/ Rudi Schwerdtfeger in his novel Doktor Faustus).

“Louise Maria von Senger”—she too later swapped the “von” for a “de,” but then also adopted as her first name the English version of her second one—was nine months younger than Schoeck.