In September 1817, when Schubert set to music (for the second time) Schiller's poem Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (Group from Hades), he had not yet managed to find his way out of the schoolteacher routine that, as he often complained to his friends, limited the time that he was able to spend at his musical pursuits. Yet Gruppe aus dem Tartarus II is one of 70 lieder that Schubert composed that year. Schubert's compositional growth during 1817 was extraordinary. We need not imagine how differently Schubert might have set Schiller's grisly verses just a year or two earlier: indeed, we have on paper the very thing (a fragmentary Gruppe aus dem Tartarus I, D. 396, of early 1816), and it hardly compares with the 1817 setting. In Gruppe aus dem Tartarus II, D. 583 Schubert finds ways to portray in music the hell and torment of the poem; it is like nothing he had yet written—melody, as we normally think of it in a song, is all but absent, and the singer at times seems almost insignificant next to the piano's astounding colorations. In 1823, the song was published as the first number of Opus 24.

Schiller's poem is in three stanzas, and Schubert sets them in a way that has nothing whatever to do with the strophic model. The music for each stanza differs from its companion stanzas in just about every way, save that the basic musical building blocks—tritones and semitones, unstable elements traditionally considered to be musically "evil"—remain constant. A low, chromatically rising rumbling from the piano draws us into the Hades of our eternally damned group, twice erupting into full-scale belligerence before the singer has even joined the fray. Throughout the song tonality is continually undercut by incessant modulations up by semitone (the large-scale framework: the song begins and ends in C minor and moves to F sharp minor in the middle, making a large structural tritone).

For the second stanza, at the start of which the foul sufferers' faces are "bent by pain, their mouths stuffed full of curses," Schubert begins a turbulent, accent-filled Allegro. Pulsating eighth notes, still continually rising, mark the third stanza, during which C major briefly shines forth like a beacon of hope ("eternity circles round them"). In the end, however, the music plunges—chromatically, of course—down into the most-desolate-imaginable C minor pianissimo.

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