By 1920 Straube had made clear to his superiors that he was not the sort of cantor who was content to sit in Leipzig, placidly carrying out routine duties. Over the last decades he had accumulated star power in his interlocking roles as organist, choral director, editor, and pedagogue. The international musical community knew who he was. If the local authorities intended to hold him, they needed to assume a nearly perpetual posture of negotiation as institutions elsewhere approached with lucrative offers. The restive Thomaskantor was not satisfied enough with his situation simply to dismiss outright the possibility of a career advance, and too politically minded not to exploit such instances to his professional advantage. Mayor and Council had learned these lessons quickly and vividly during the short time since Straube had taken the job. In the following years the civic leadership would return repeatedly to fresh demands from the cantor's office. But in spring 1920, the Munich question now finally off his radar, Straube seemed to have committed to Leipzig. He would pursue the “great task,” as Hausegger had put it that April, within the parameters of his ever-expanding influence in the Saxon city on the Pleisse.

The first thing that loomed was the Neue Bachgesellschaft's formidable eighth German Bachfest, to be spearheaded by Straube and his Gewandhaus Chorus in Leipzig on the weekend of June 19–21, 1920. In 1918 he had been elected secretary of the NBG, signaling his growing influence in the society. Vienna had hosted the last major festival in May 1914, and the planning committee for that event surely remembered the major scheduling collision with the Bach-Verein's own Leipzig Bachfest, exposing rifts between Straube and other members of the Gesellschaft's Board. But the clouds had dispersed by late 1919 when arrangements got underway for the landmark 1920 festival, the first after the war. Now the Board noted the Verein's “generous accommodation” even as it directed praise to the city, its “excellent friends of art,” and its “energetic” Thomaskantor. Such esprit de corps was a far cry from the mood in 1914, and a diplomatic victory.

The June Bachfest amounted to another feather in Straube's cap, but the kind of “great task” of which Hausegger had written lay beyond the planning and execution of this or that festival.