Schoeck spent most of August 1954 in Brunnen with Ralph. The summer saw Dennis Brain play the British premiere of his Horn Concerto at the Edinburgh Festival, in an all-Swiss concert given by the Collegium Musicum Zürich under Paul Sacher. W. R. Anderson wrote in the Musical Times that the concerto was “an easier-going, older-fashioned piece, in which Dennis Brain made the mastery of this intensely difficult instrument sound as simple as shelling peas.” Schoeck's health made it impossible for him to attend. But he was also busy composing. October saw him back in Brunnen, this time to work on some Lenau settings for a new orchestral cycle. He had never lost his high regard for Lenau—“the only truly musical poet,” he had remarked just two years before—but had not set any of his poems since the Notturno in the early 1930s. In mood, this new cycle is also perhaps closest to the Notturno, except that it is even darker yet. There is no hint of a narrative; it is a half-hour rumination on death, depression, and despair.The first setting that Schoeck composed was of the double sonnet “Einsamkeit” (“Loneliness”), which asks rhetorically “Have you ever found yourself on a moor, utterly alone, loveless, without God? … The whole world is sad to the point of despair.” The subsequent poems that he set were hardly any jollier.