In his early days as a composer, Schubert would often set the same poem more than once. Sometimes he seems to have been dissatisfied with his original setting and the second setting serves as a sort of ex post facto rewrite. Sometimes he set the poem for an entirely different medium and the second setting serves as a kind of ex post facto correction. And sometimes it was both, as in the case of Schubert's 1817 setting of Johann von Salis-Seewis' poem Die Einsiedelei (The Hermitage) (D. 563). Schubert had first set Salis-Seewis' poem as an all-male vocal quartet in early 1816, then re-set it a few months later as a solo song with piano accompaniment. Yet neither setting seemed to satisfy Schubert, the first perhaps because it might have struck him as inappropriate to have four men singing about the solitary life and the second perhaps because the ceaselessly cheerful sixteenth-note water music in the piano accompaniment might have struck him as irrelevant to a song which spends three of its four verses lost in images of a dark and gloomy forest. The third setting of 1817, however, is for solo voice with piano accompaniment and it seem best to capture the sorrows and contentments of the solitary life. A strophic setting of Salis-Seewis' four-verse poem, the 1817 Die Einsiedelei seems to start in A minor only to find its true tonic a bar later and this alternation wends its way through the whole song, giving it the ambivalence of the poem and the cohesion of the 1816 song. ~ James Leonard, All Music Guide
