In spring 1923 Schoeck was again contemplating an opera: this time his challenge was how to combine the Grimm fairy tales Meister Pfriem and Bruder Lustig into a single plot. Franz Wiegele wrote on his behalf to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the hope of procuring for him the man everyone acknowledged as the leading librettist of the age. It was not to be, for Hofmannsthal was committed to Strauss alone, and he had in any case just begun working on his libretto for their Ägyptische Helena. So for now Schoeck put all his opera plans to one side. In the meantime he had begun work on a suite for string quartet that was partly programmatic in intent. Its scherzo is a “burlesque serenade” in which bitonality is used for humorous effect, depicting how one of the players of a serenade gets stuck in the wrong key and provokes laughter from the other instruments. The second movement, apparently a “rain song” (“Regenlied”), is visually reminiscent of the opening of the fourth movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, with its wide ascending arc in which one instrument takes over from the next. But when one hears it, Schoeck's quartet instead confirms the increasing influence on him of contemporary French music. In its first movement there are distinct similarities—not least in its sarabande rhythms—both to thefinal movement of Ravel's Ma mère l'oye (which Schoeck had conducted just seventeen months before) and to Honegger's First String Quartet.