Picture the most fun weekend you can ever remember, away from it all, enjoying something wholly foundational and completely new. You and a group of friends decide to go fly fishing in a mountain resort you have never visited. One of the gang has experience at fly fishing for trout and pledges to teach the rest. It’s a special technique, different from other forms.
There you are in the late springtime surrounded by large trees, blooming wild flowers, the sun shining and glistening off a fast-moving river. No one else around. The fresh water hits rocks and creates little white peaks that come and go. You dare not wear earbuds because the sounds of nature are all so beautiful, interrupted only by delightful conversation and laughter from your buddies.
You are out there to catch some fighting trout as they journey upstream, leaping over rocks during their seasonal ritual. Your gear includes wading boots, a vest full of flies you worked to tie, and a rod designed specifically for this purpose. Your teacher demonstrates and you and others copy his motions, allowing the flies to dance on the water.
Suddenly a trout bites and the time has come to bring the catch to shore. It is extremely tricky because these hooks have to be tiny and too much tugging and tanking can easily cause the fish to get away. Several do but you stay at it. And finally it happens, your first catch. It is beautiful, a rainbow trout that seems to be painted by a master painter, its watery body lit up and shining in the sun.
Your friends celebrate and everyone is back at it.
This scene you can recreate in your own living space right now, by listening to “The Trout Quintet” by Franz Schubert. It’s one of his most enduringly delightful pieces, containing not a hint of darkness but only the joy of the good life. More than any piece of music I’ve heard, it seems to embody the scene perfectly, completely with leaping trout, roiling streams, the glories of nature, and friendship all around.
For years, I had imagined that Franz had been on a trout-fishing journey and returned to write this. How else would he have done it?
It turns out not to be true. The story is slightly different.
In summer 1819, when Schubert was only 22 years old, he took a walking tour of Upper Austria with his friend, the prominent baritone Johann Michael Vogl, a promoter of Schubert’s music. They visited Steyr, a gorgeous town with large streams where Vogl had connections. There they met potential benefactor Sylvester Paumgartner, a wealthy amateur cellist, music patron, and host of local musical soirées.
Keep in mind that Schubert had already written hundreds of songs, and they had become famous in salons. In his short life—he died tragically young at the age of 31—he had written more than 1,000 of them, once eight in one day. It was strange: his brain seemed to manufacture a constant flow of them. Absolute genius. But even at 22, he was excelling at chamber works.
Paumgartner commissioned a new piano quintet from the young composer, with two specific requests. He had to use unusual instrumentation: piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass instead of the standard piano plus string quartet. He did this because he liked the depth created by this instrumentation. And he had to include a set of variations on “Die Forelle” as one of the movements.
Schubert accepted the deal. He composed the quintet that summer and polished it shortly after returning to Vienna. Some accounts suggest it was premiered informally in Steyr with Paumgartner and friends participating. Others indicate Schubert sent the parts back to him later. Schubert wrote the individual instrumental parts directly with amazing speed.
The piece has five movements, featuring a virtuosic fortepiano part. The theme appears and reappears with indescribable delight. The overall mood is cheerful, sunny, and full of youthful vitality. So technically Schubert was not himself experiencing the joy of fly fishing but he certainly hoped to convey this to the listener. He achieves this with perfection.
I’m not among those who regard Schubert as some kind of otherworldly genius on the level of Bach or Beethoven. In some ways, that makes him more appealing. His symphonies, for example, strike me as unpolished, affectedly serious, and not quite what they were supposed to be. Of course, they are burdened by the comparison to Beethoven himself in whose shadow Schubert lived in his short life.
Schubert experienced nothing like the fame of the masters of the age. His compositions were mostly for friends and performed in private homes. He was short, very nearsighted, and a bit rotund, such that he was commonly called the German word for little mushroom: “Schwammerl.” All these details help humanize him more than the valorized genius of his time but also make his music more accessible.
As for “The Trout Quintet,” it was performed throughout his life but only fully published after his death. It remains a huge favorite in chamber performance. I could hear it as much as it is performed. It is always fresh, always delightful.
I’ve tried to understand why it has such uplifting power, and it comes down to how it seems to musically embody the idea of hope: hope to learn a new skill, catch a fish, fall in love, and live a good life. You hear it all.
Some people think classical music should be appreciated without context, without preparation with a story, stripped of biography, time, and place, and hence heard as pure art. Having thought about this for years, I’ve come to believe that this is entirely wrong. In fact, that theory is a disaster for the cause. To humanize the music, set up its meaning and import, to tell the story of the piece before hearing the piece; all seems essential to me.
“The Trout Quintet” was not written as an abstraction. It was music designed as the soundtrack to a thrilling life experience, by a particular person in a particular time. Once you know that, the piece becomes larger than the notes. It creates images in the mind. It invites the listener to fill in all the details from one’s own personal life.
I also like to imagine what life was like in the 1820s in Germany following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the Belle Epoque when middle-class prosperity was rising and intellectual society and the arts were beginning to thrive as never before. I can imagine Schubert and his friends in private homes, probably eating and drinking too much, listening to his wonderful songs all night.
What times! This piece is a window into that as much as any history book.
Schubert himself was famously shy, so much so that as Beethoven was dying, Franz was invited to visit. Upon arrival, he could not speak. He just froze with fear. In any case, Schubert was still asked to be among the 36 torchbearers at Beethoven’s funeral.
Too many listeners only know Schubert from his symphonies. This is an artifact of venue and orchestral repertoire. To my mind, it’s the chamber works that reveal his incredible but very human genius, and nowhere with such delight as “The Trout Quintet.” Charm, fun, discovery, friendship, and love, it’s all here, the soundtrack to the best vacation you have ever had.
