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Schubert Piano Quintet 'Trout'
Adagio & Rondo Concertante
Adagio & Rondo Concertante
The son of a schoolmaster who had settled in Vienna, Franz Schubert was educated as a chorister of the imperial court chapel and later qualified as a schoolteacher, briefly and thereafter intermittently joining his father in the classroom. He spent his life largely in Vienna, enjoying the company of friends, but never holding any position in the musical establishment or attracting the kind of patronage that Beethoven had twenty years earlier. His final years were clouded by illness, as the result of a syphilitic infection, and he died in 1828, leaving much unfinished. His gifts had been most notably expressed in song, his talent for melody always evident in his other compositions. Schubert's compositions are generally numbered according to the Deutsch catalogue, with the letter D. The Trout Quintet is the popular name for his Piano Quintet in A major. In Otto Erich Deutsch's catalogue of Schubert's works, it is D. 667. The work was composed in 1819,[1] when Schubert was only 22 years old; it was not published, however, until 1829, a year after his death.[2] Rather than the usual piano quintet lineup of piano and string quartet, Schubert's piece is written for piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass. The composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel had rearranged his own Septet for the same instrumentation,[3] and the Trout was actually written for a group of musicians coming together to play Hummel's work. The piece is known as the Trout because the fourth movement is a set of variations on Schubert's earlier Lied "Die Forelle" (The Trout). Apparently, the quintet was written for Sylvester Paumgartner, of Steyr in Upper Austria, a wealthy music patron and amateur cellist, who also suggested that Schubert include a set of variations on the Lied.[1] A set of variations on a melody from one of his Lieder is found in three other works by Schubert: the Death and the Maiden Quartet, the Trockne Blumen Variations for flute and piano (D. 802) and the Wanderer Fantasy.