“Damned Rüeger has left me in the lurch!” Schoeck wrote to his mother on 12 August 1920. Rüeger had delivered the second act of Venus before Schoeck's departure for Geneva in June, but within only six weeks Schoeck was bombarding him with requests for the third. He managed to oblige, but in a letter of 19 August, Schoeck insisted on various changes and cuts. His description of what he needs—a duel between the hero Horace and his brother-in law Raimond, plus the latter's curse on Horace—makes one wish that Rüeger had not given in so easily, for every production of the opera at this point exudes a whiff of melodrama.

It seems that Rüeger's original idea of Venus had been of something slightly ironic, even comical, not too far removed in spirit from their Don Ranudo (and thus much closer to both Mérimée and a Busonian “Young Classicality”). His conception seems to have been shared by Schoeck, for the first act bristles with stock operatic characters and situations: the absurd old Baron Zarandelle, the moralizing mother-in-law, the wedding chorus at the close, and so on. There are some lovely passages, such as Simone's opening aria to spring, but the overall idiom is closest to the more conservative of the Eichendorff songs Op. 30, and there is little to suggest that either composer or librettist was really inspired by the topic.