The postwar surge of interest in Schoeck's operas in his native land continued in the 1951–52 season, when the Bern City Theater put four of them on its program: Don Ranudo, Das Wandbild, Vom Fischer, and Erwin und Elmire. He had never before had his operas performed with such regularity. But still he swung in and out of depression, convinced that his music was being ignored. Hindemith's triumphant return to Europe to take up the Chair of Musicology at Zurich University prompted much envy. He had been the man of the moment in Zurich when his Mathis der Maler was premiered in 1938, and now, returning after an absence of over a decade, he had immediately become the center of attention once again. Stravinsky was also back in Europe, conquering the stage with his Rake's Progress. Schoeck went to see its Zurich production in December 1951 but found it “unutterably weak … this is music that's as dry as a beetle's arse.” The voices just did not “breathe” properly, he said. His biggest concern in late 1951, however, was the state of his brother Paul, whose black days were even blacker than his own. Paul had experienced a severe nervous breakdown in the previous spring and had been placed in the same sanatorium where, over two decades earlier, Corrodi's father had spent his last years in a mental haze.