Das Lied im Grünen, D. 917 is one of a handful of Franz Schubert songs whose publication missed their composer's life by just a matter of months—Schubert wrote the song in the summer of 1827, succumbed to his illness in November 1828, and thus wasn't around to see the song published as the first Lied of Opus 115 in June of the following year. Das Lied im Grünen is a setting of a poem by Johann Anton Friedrich Reil (Friedrich to his friends), the only setting of Reil verse Schubert ever made. It is a wonderful song that ranks high in the composer's catalog of "spring" songs.

Reil's poem was in seven stanzas when Schubert originally set it, but someone (poet? publisher?) inserted an additional stanza before the last one after Schubert died; today, some editions have seven, some eight stanzas. Schubert's A major music is as lithe and lively as the country springtime of the poem; it is not necessarily fast (Mässing, "moderato," is the indication), however. There are constant light-footed, better still light-fingered, eighth-note arpeggios in the piano right hand, and a robust melody that is appropriately folkish in appearance. Schubert uses to strands of music in a free strophic way—one is wholly in A major, the other roves about chromatically, just a little bit, from its D major starting point. During the last few stanzas, Schubert reshapes the opening music first to touch on F sharp minor and then, near the end, to provide a wonderfully ominous underscore (for the first an only time in the song the bass voice slows its constant quarter-note tread) for the text "and if some day the world should be no longer green for us," a grim sentiment immediately dissolved by a rich and happy climax that shoots all the way up to high A in the voice part before settling back down to a rich pianissimo piano postlude.

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