Franz Schubert’s song “Die Forelle” was composed about 1817 (with later revisions), with words by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. It is among the most familiar of Schubert’s approximately 600 songs, and it is best known as the basis for the theme of the fourth movement of Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major, better known as the Trout Quintet.
The song’s lyrics were written from the perspective of an onlooker on a riverbank taking pleasure in watching the “happy little fish” swimming in the river.
Soon a fisherman arrives and, much to the onlooker’s dismay, catches the trout. Here, as he had in “Erlkönig,” Schubert displays his mastery of the genre by using the music to convey the viewer’s emotions—first pleasure in the creature’s freedom and then dismay and anger while empathizing with the dying fish.
Note the excellent English translation as the song proceeds.
Here is the original song, which was later adapted by Schubert into his “Trout Quintet” for Piano and strings.
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