Mr. Morris opens the first movement with a sustained passage of naturalistically pedestrian, though precisely choreographed, movement: walking, standing, kneeling — people at peace with themselves and one another in a variety of quiet moods. This proves to be a pencil sketch of the colored painting that follows after Mr. Morris adds dancing: It introduces much that “The Trout” then further develops. He makes a pronounced use of peripheral stage space, with dancers often entering from one wing only to depart soon into the adjacent one without crossing the stage — thus suggesting that we’re simply watching a segment of a far larger world that’s populated much the same way.

Often Mr. Morris introduces a dance motif (sometimes a single lift or gesture, sometimes an extended phrase) with one dancer, then multiplies it. This mirrors Schubert’s musical structure; and there are several moments when Mr. Morris’s choice of movement has a wonderful oddity, as when Noah Vinson starts the third Scherzo movement with a tricky but naïve sequence of footwork and jumps. Though the sequence is a lot more contrived than the music, its point — this helpless, unpolished little outburst of impulsive high spirits when alone in nature — is pleasing. Several other motifs have a deliberately pastoral character: a turn of the head and eyes to admire the view, a moment of standing-still receptiveness with one leg folded over another.

The wonderful simplicity of the Morris dancers’ stage manners tends to be more lovable than the schematic material they’ve been given. Mr. Morris makes sure that we register his motifs — they often come like punch lines, more staccato and end-stopped than the musical figures they illustrate — after which his reiterations are more than we need. One effortful lift, in which a woman is held aloft by her pelvis while her head and limbs aim downward, soon looks like a gimmick.