PIANO QUINTET IN A MAJOR, OP. 114, D. 667 (TROUT)

Franz Schubert
(b. Vienna, Austria, January 31, 1797; d. Vienna, November 19, 1828)

Composed c.1819; 40 minutes

The period around the year 1819, when Franz Schubert wrote his Trout Quintet, one of the most endearing works in the repertoire, was a rich one for lovers of chamber music. Beethoven, then in his 50s, was writing his profound late string quartets. Mendelssohn, not yet in his teens, was shortly to write his Octet. Schubert, in his early 20s had ahead of him such masterpieces as the Death and the Maiden Quartet, the Octet and the Great C major Quintet. Chamber music was alive and well, and living, above all, in the city of Vienna. It was here that a tradition of hausmusik thrived among the music-loving middle-classes and bourgeoisie. And it was for this tradition of amateur music-making in the home that Schubert wrote his Trout Quintet. 

He was on vacation in the Alpine countryside, in the town of Steyr, Upper Austria, when the commission came. Steyr was the hometown of his friend, the well-known singer Johann Vogl, for whom Schubert wrote many of his 600 songs. Schubert was Vogl’s guest, and together they visited another Steyr resident, Sylvester Paumgartner, who was a wealthy mining director and keen amateur cellist. Paumgartner asked Schubert to write a chamber work for his hausmusik group. The idea of including a movement based on Schubert’s song Die Forelle (The Trout) also seems to have come from Paumgartner. The instruments specified – piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass – remain an unusual grouping. But they were the instruments used in a published Viennese arrangement of Hummel’s popular Septet of 1816 which Schubert would have known. 

The number of movements in the Trout Quintet is also unusual. Four was the convention. But here, a fifth movement, a series of variations on The Trout, was inserted between the Scherzo and finale. The movement starts with a simplified version of the opening of the song. As the music progresses, the theme only gradually reveals its full subtleties, culminating in the final variation, the focal point of the quintet. The work’s great clarity of texture comes about largely through the way Schubert contrasts the rich, resonant (and potentially bottom-heavy) scoring for the four string instruments with a brighter, more transparent piano line – created by having the pianist frequently play in octaves high in the upper range of the keyboard, much as in Schubert’s piano duos. Another hallmark of the work is that the piano is usually heard in dialogue with the strings, rather than in a mutual single texture that develops the work’s themes. Schubert wrote to his brother Ferdinand about the ‘inconceivably beautiful’ countryside around Steyr and it's not hard to picture the picturesque, sunlit freshness of the Alpine air in the five movements of the quintet. 

— All program notes copyright © 2023 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca