Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Quintet in A major for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano, op. 114, Trout
For all the popularity Schubert’s Trout Quintet has attained, it’s earliest years are shrouded in mystery. We know when Schubert wrote it, who commissioned it, and where it was finished, but for a decade thereafter the trail goes cold: neither the manuscript nor an account of its first performance have come down. And, until its publication in 1829, there’s little record of how it fared.
That’s not necessarily surprising, though. Schubert was wildly prolific, after all, and much of his music – especially the chamber works – were intended for private performances. That seems to have been the case with the beloved Trout.
It was requested by a certain Sylvester Paumgartner, a wealthy merchant from the town of Steyr (about 90 miles outside of Vienna) who was also a cellist of limited abilities and an enthusiastic music lover. His home in the village included a music room, a salon, and a well-stocked music library that apparently contained at least one Schubert song, his 1817 setting of Christian Schubart’s “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”), which Paumgartner requested be incorporated as a set of variations in a new quintet.
Schubert, who met Paumgartner while he was summering in Steyr in 1819, was also instructed to follow the instrumentation of a piano quintet (actually a quintet arrangement of a septet) by Johann Nepomuk Hummel of which his patron was a fan. Thus the omission of a second violin and the inclusion of a double bass, giving the Trout Quintet its distinctive sonority and making it one of only a small handful of major chamber works to feature that instrument.
The piece was begun during that summer of 1819 but not completed until the autumn, after Schubert had returned to Vienna. And this is where its history gets sketchy. The Trout may have been performed later that year in Steyr – or maybe not. What is known is that, by the time it was published a decade later, it was regarded by connoisseurs as being of the first rank. And it’s has retained that stature ever since.
It’s not hard to see why. Schubert’s writing in it is ebullient and unfailingly lyrical. The scoring is magnificently involved: every player in the ensemble shines, even the bass. Expressively, hardly a cloud darkens the music’s pages. The piece is, in essence, forty minutes of sheer, unbridled joy and great tunes, all of it brilliantly written. What’s not to love?
Unlike its four-movement Hummel model, the Trout Quintet features five movements. The first is cast in an expansive sonata form, though Schubert’s handling of its structure is freer and more rhapsodic than what one often encounters in the sonata-allegros of Haydn and Mozart.
A lyrical andante follows, featuring a number of surprising harmonic detours that anticipate the transcendent late piano sonatas and String Quintet. After this comes a blistering, exuberant Scherzo and then the famous variations on “Die Forelle.”
Each of the five variations are masterpieces of invention. The first three feature elaborations above and around the familiar tune (which is passed, respectively, from piano to viola to cello/bass). In the concluding pair, the music turns, first, to a furious, minor-key episode and, finally, wanders more leisurely through some fresh key areas. A forthright recapitulation of the lied closes everything out amiably.
The jovial spirit of “Die Forelle” isn’t far removed from the jaunty finale, which wraps the entire piece up in a burst of rhythmic energy and gloriously shifting tonal colors. It’s music that recalls the earlier movements and wraps up the whole piece, a reflection of one of the happiest summers of Schubert’s life, in an affectionate blaze.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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