Although Schubert set Goethe's Jägers Abendlied (Hunter's Evening Song) (D. 215) twice, the first setting from June 1815 was unknown at the time the first collected edition of his songs was published and only included much later in the new collected edition. Indeed, Schubert himself left the song unfinished: after setting two verses of Goethe's four-verse poem, Schubert abandoned the song. It's easy to understand why: although very beautiful in Schubert's best, early bel canto manner and although it marvelously evokes the poem's atmosphere of loss and longing, the song's very beauty and evocativeness works against it. Schubert joined Goethe's first two verses as a single strophe, but the music that is singularly appropriate for those verses is singularly ill-suited for the changed emotions of the latter two verses and Schubert apparently could see no way to bridge the gap. Of course, the song is performable as a two-verse torso, but even the indefatigable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau declined to include this setting in his monumental survey of Schubert's songs.

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