Die Forelle
Schubert chose to set the text of a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, first published in the Schwäbischer Musenalmanach in 1783.
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 wrote "Die Forelle" in the single key of D-flat major with a varied (or modified) strophic form.
The musicologist Marjorie Wing Hirsch describes its type in the Schubert lieder as a "lyrical song with admixtures of dramatic traits".
On Samsung's clothes washers and dryers, a short rendition of the basic melody of this song is an indicator that the machine's cycle has completed.
[4] Schubart wrote "Die Forelle" in 1782,[5] 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.
[8] The academic Thomas Kramer observes that "Die Forelle" is "somewhat unusual with its mock-naive pretense of being about a bona fide fish",[9] whereas he describes it as "a sexual parable".
[14] From the following year to 1821 Schubert composed four songs using the poems of Schubart, "An den Tod" (D518), "An mein Klavier" (D342), "Die Forelle" (D550) and "Grablied auf einen Soldaten" (D454).
According to the American historian Mark Ringer, Schubert used a "musical structure that reflects both the life cycle of the earth and the progress from innocence to experience".
[22] When the fisherman catches the trout, the vocal line changes from major to minor, the piano figuration becomes darker and the flowing phrases are "broken by startled rests".
[5] A second copy, written in May or June 1817, was for Franz Sales Kandler's album: this version was marked Nicht zu geschwind (not too fast).
[28] The messiness was partly accounted for by Schubert's drunken state, but also explained by the accompanying note he wrote to Josef: "Just as, in my haste, I was going to send the thing, I rather sleepily took up the ink-well and poured it calmly over it.
The final version has "a five-bar piano prelude"[30] and is presently in the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation Collection of the Library of Congress.
[38] Newbould agrees, pointing out that the quintet was "acknowledging the song's meteoric rise up early nineteenth-century Vienna's equivalent to the charts".
