In April 1933, as chairman of the Dresden chapter of the Militant League for German Culture, he invited various music critics to a conference with papers on opera in the Third Reich.
[5] In the new edition of his concert guide Oratorios and secular choral works he wrote in 1939: "The new spiritual Germany with its moving thoughts: people and leader, homeland, blood and soil, race, myth, heroic history, ethos of work, community of all creative folk comrades carries within it the old metaphysical longing for artistic idealization of its highest visual goods".
After the Second World War, Schnoor remained in the Soviet occupation zone until 1948 and was able to publish a book there to mark the 400th anniversary of the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden.
[10] As a critic, Schnoor ignited a media scandal in June 1956, after he had torn Arnold Schönberg's Holocaust melodrama A Survivor from Warsaw in the Westfalen-blatt at a program announcement with the following words: "that disgusting play, which must be seem like a mockery to every decent German.
In his lecture on the "Platz der Neuen Musik" (New Music Square), Zillig presented the work of his teacher Schönberg and at the end quoted the article by his co-examiner.
Only two days later, a four-column article by Walter Dirks about the conference appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "Bericht über ein Scherbengericht",[12] which dealt exclusively with the Schnoor case.
[15] After the musicologist Fred K. Prieberg among other things accused him in a polemical broadcast on Südwestfunk Baden-Baden of "National Socialist music criticism",[16] Schnoor, supported by his publisher Hermann Stumpf, filed a private lawsuit.
Musik der Gegenwart, in which he made no secret of his aversion to New Music and, among others, tore Stravinsky to pieces, but instead identified Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner as the most important composers of the 20th century.