Die Forelle

"Die Forelle" (German for "The Trout"), Op. 32, D 550. is a lied, or song, composed in early 1817 for solo voice and piano with music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828). Schubert chose to set the text of a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, first published in the Schwäbischer Musenalmanach in 1783. The full poem tells the story of a trout being caught by a fisherman, but in its final stanza reveals its purpose as a moral piece warning young women to guard against young men. When Schubert set the poem to music, he removed the last verse, which contained the moral, changing the song's focus and enabling it to be sung by male or female singers. Schubert produced six subsequent copies of the work, all with minor variations.

Schubert wrote "Die Forelle" in the single key of D-flat major with a varied (or modified) strophic form. The first two verses have the same structure but change for the final verse to give a musical impression of the trout being caught. In the Deutsch catalogue of Schubert's works it is number 550, or D. 550. The musicologist Marjorie Wing Hirsch describes its type in the Schubert lieder as a "lyrical song with admixtures of dramatic traits".

The song was popular with contemporary audiences, which led to Schubert being commissioned to write a piece of chamber music based on the song. This commission resulted in the Trout Quintet (D. 667), in which a set of variations of "Die Forelle" are present in the fourth movement.

The lyrics of the lied are from a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. Opinion is divided on his abilities: The Musical Times considers him to be "one of the feeblest poets" whose work was used by Schubert, and comments that he "was content with versifying pretty ideas", while the singer and author Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau considered Schubart to be "a very talented poet, musician and orator". Schubart wrote "Die Forelle" in 1782, while imprisoned in the fortress of Hohenasperg; he was a prisoner there from 1777 to 1787 for insulting the mistress of Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg. The poem was published in the Schwäbischer Musenalmanach of 1783, consisting of four stanzas.

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