A rocky marriage in an unwanted house was not Schoeck's only problem in late 1929. He had offered his latest works to Breitkopf & Härtel, his most regular publisher of the past decade: the three songs Opus 35, the Bass Clarinet Sonata, Op. 41, Wandersprüche, Op. 42, and the Hesse-Lieder, Op. 44. But Breitkopf only agreed to take on the songs with piano, offered a one-off fee of 750 marks, and asked for more time to consider the sonata and the song cycle, which it deemed “difficult works in publishing terms.” Schoeck was furious, withdrew all four works, and thus essentially broke off his relationship with Breitkopf.

He had picked just about the worst possible time for a business argument. Gustav Stresemann, the chancellor largely responsible for creating Germany's current economic stability, died of a heart attack on 3 October 1929, and the twenty-ninth of the same month saw the New York stock market collapse on “Black Tuesday.” While the worst repercussions of these events only became apparent over the ensuing months, the economic downturn did nothing to improve the lot of music publishers or their composers. Karl Heinrich David tried to help Schoeck by asking Hindemith for advice. The latter replied on 29 October 1929 that he knew of “a whole number of composers” who were having similar difficulties with their publishers, and that the blame lay simply with the current state of the music industry.