Der Fluss (The River) (D. 693) was not the first, nor would it be the last, of Schubert's water songs, but it is certainly among the most beautiful of them. Indeed, it is a self-conscious beauty, a deliberate attempt on Schubert's part to write a song whose long-breathed cantilena verges on becoming an aria. Setting Friedrich von Schlegel's four pantheistically poetic verses as two onomatopoeically musical verses, Schubert's song traces the course of the river and its mirrored reflection of the heavens above it. The piano accompaniment rolls over nearly continuous sextuplets in the left hand below, with the right hand providing occasional eddies and flows above. As befits one of Schubert's quasi-devotional God-in-nature songs, some of the harmonic changes seem almost hymn-like in their use of secondary dominants.

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