Is Sei Mir Gegrüsst! (I greet you!) (D. 741) one of the most rapturously ecstatic of all Schubert's songs, or is it one of the most sentimentally schmaltzy? If Rückert's five-verse poem as thought of as a serenade sung with lute in hand to a beloved perched dreamily on a balcony, the song is surely as tired and trite as many performances have made it sound. But if Rückert's poem is thought of as a prayer sung by a lover separated from his beloved not by the slight vertical distance from the ground to a balcony, but from the Earth to the great beyond—if, in other words, the poet of the "Songs on the Deaths of Children" was once again feeling much possessed by death—then the song is one of the most beautiful of all Schubert's love songs. But it all depends on the performance. Taking Schubert's tempo indication of Langsam (slowly) too slowly turns the song into a dirge, taking it too quickly turns the 3/4 time signature into a waltz, but taking it just right makes it softly rapturous. Taking the piano accompaniment's staccato right hand chords too staccato turns the song into a sprightly dance, taking the augmented second in the first bar (and in nearly every bar thereafter) too hard turns the song into sappy romance, but taking the accompaniment just right makes the song quietly ecstatic. But most importantly, taking the vocal melody as the very embodiment of endless longing, taking the rising Sei mir gegrüsst (I greet you) as hope and the twice repeated Sei mir geküsst! (I kiss you!) as fulfillment, taking the music's combination of joy and sorrow dead seriously can all make Sei Mir Gegrüsst! one of the greatest of all Schubert's love songs. Certainly, it is one of his most exquisitely composed songs. It appears strophic in its setting of Rückert's five verses as an alternating ABABA pattern, but Schubert modifies the pattern to express the meaning of the words and to keep the music moving toward its climax in the final verse. After the eight-bar piano prelude, the first verse is in the tonic of B flat major, with the refrain's aching harmonic feint that seems to be moving toward the relative minor, but in fact turns back to the tonic major. The second verse starts on the dominant, but modulates downwards to the refrain. The apparent return of the melody of the first verse in the third verse is in the tonic minor, which returns to the tonic major for the refrain. The apparent return of the music of the second verse in the fourth verse starts again in the dominant, but modulates upwards to the refrain. The fifth and final verse seems to be a recapitulation of the first verse, but Schubert modulates up to the flattened supertonic for the song's climax and then downward to the final repetition of the refrain, bringing the song to a blissful close.

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