In a letter of 31 March 1908 Schoeck wrote to his parents confidently of his future plans: he would seek out either a “little job” at an opera house, or, preferably, as a choral conductor, “which won't be so difficult at all in Switzerland.” Switzerland was certainly full of choirs. But while those in the metropolitan centers had the resources to put on occasional large-scale works with orchestra, their members were still amateurs and their repertoire largely dross. The principal alternative—a post at a small opera house in Germany—would have given Schoeck far more useful experience. Almost without exception, those composers before him who had excelled in orchestration had spent their galley years in small theaters: Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler are the obvious examples. The leading composers of the nineteenth century whose orchestration has been most regularly criticized were those who had undergone little or no orchestral apprenticeship—Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. Schoeck must have known this, but still he chose the easier option of choral conducting back in his native land. With time, his powers of orchestration would be second to none—though only after he had abandoned choirs to conduct an orchestra instead. Schoeck's operas, however, would always lack the the atrical draughtsmanship that might have been learnt as a matter of course had he worked in an opera house.