The compositional development of Othmar Schoeck mirrored that of many of his contemporaries, from Strauss to Bartók: Romantic beginnings in the wake of Wagner and Brahms led inexorably to the cusp of atonality (and occasionally beyond it), from which there was then a retreat (an admittedly loaded word) into an aesthetic variously neoclassical or neo-Romantic or both. The return to tonality of Bartók, Strauss, Stravinsky, and others has been much investigated, and in the case of those composers who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s it has often been postulated that it was the need to make a living in the New World that encouraged them to write in a more accessible idiom. But this is tantamount to asserting that American audiences are less cultivated, less intelligent than European ones. While this arrogance matches perfectly the anti-American cultural chauvinism that has long been latent in Europe, we must not forget that every composer has to earn a living, and a composer who is compelled to find his feet in a new environment—be it New York, California, or anywhere else on the globe—will probably endeavor to ingratiate himself as quickly as possible in order to meet his basic needs. For a composer to “remain true” to his art and end up starving in a Bohemian garret rather than compromise his modernity and live, is a concept far more attractive to romanticizing musicologists than it ever has been to composers themselves.