Die Forelle

Die Forelle (D. 550, Op. 32) is among Schubert's early contributions to the genre of the Lied, a 19th-century German art song for solo voice and piano. Schubert composed over 600 Lieder, and although many of them became popular, Die Forelle was and still is one of the most widely recognized and performed. Composed in 1817, Die Forelle takes its text from a 1783 poem of the same name by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. In it, a casual observer stands on the banks of a tranquil stream, admiring the movements of a "frisky" fish as it darts below the surface. The tone of the music changes when, to the observer's horror, a fisherman puts an end to both his and the trout's merriment by snagging the fish on his hook and reeling him in. In a final stanza which Schubert omits from his setting, we learn that Schubart's poem is actually a metaphorical story intended to warn young women against the trickery of their young male suitors. As in Gretchen am Spinnrade and many other Lieder, Schubert "characterizes" the piano accompaniment, in this case through both the upward-winding sixteenth-note triplets representing the wriggling movements of a fish, and the abrupt shift towards agitated rhythms in measure 33 when the fish is hooked. The song gained such swift popularity that only two years after its composition in 1817, Schubert was commissioned to write an instrumental chamber work incorporating music from Die Forelle. The result was his Trout Quintet of 1819 (Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667), the fourth movement of which is a set of variations on the Die Forelle tune. This arrangement is also available for 3-part tenor-bass choir (TTB) published by Tully Road Music, and 3-part treble (SSA) voices published by Hal Leonard Corporation, 10500871.