We do not know if Schoeck attended the world premiere of Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen in Zurich on 25 January 1946 under Paul Sacher, though we can be sure that he attended the first performance of Strauss's new oboe concerto under Andreae in the Zurich Tonhalle a month later, on 26 February, because the program also included the Zurich premiere of Sommernacht. Strauss's new work naturally overshadowed everything else in the press. If Schoeck wondered why he had been so repudiated over Dürande while the former president of the Reichskulturkammer was being welcomed with open arms, one could not blame him. There is no record of Schoeck and Strauss having met during the latter's Swiss “exile,” though Schoeck's friends were certainly divided in their opinion of the older man. Schuh (already the biographer-in-waiting) was doing all he could to ease Strauss's position in Zurich, while Hermann Hesse—three of whose poems Strauss would soon set to music, thanks to Schuh's mediation—was keeping his distance on account of Strauss's inability “to withstand the devil.”

Even if Schoeck felt in any way sidelined by the presence of Strauss in Zurich, it did not affect his composing. In early March 1946 he went to stay once more with Alma Staub and her family in Männedorf. They had planned a visit of three weeks for him, but it turned into nine. He certainly enjoyed the material comforts on offer in the Villa Staub, but nor was he idle, for in those nine weeks he composed a new songbook comprising twenty-eight songs to texts by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.