His effort resulted in a piece that is always enjoyable and can also be seen as a precursor to program music, which flourished much later in the Romantic period. It appears that Schubert took the terms of commission, - that the quintet was to be “based” on the Lied - very seriously. Specifically, movement 4 (theme and variations) is suggested to be a musical depiction of the lecture given by the fish herself to the audience of young fish as follows: Thema (introduction), Variation I (my peaceful life in a brook), Variation II (the appearance of a fisherman), Variation III (teasing of the fisherman), Variation IV (getting caught, escaping and a long painful recovery), Variation V-Andante (the lesson I learnt and what I recommend, - and the audience responding), Variation V-Allegretto (fish dispersing, each vowing to be safe and free). Consequently quintet movements #1, 2, 3, and 4 corresponded to poem stanzas #1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively, followed by the last movement (#5) as the proverbial “they lived happily ever after”. Thus the last stanza (#4) turned into an advice from the escaped trout to young female trout. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the quintet, structurally and contextually, allowed us to suggest that Schubert formulated the quintet using the structure and narrative of the poem, which was transformed from the point of view of the poet to that of the trout. He also used numerous musical formulations depicting the beauty of the watery world, formulations which were found in his many Lieder prior to the quintet. Indeed, the musical materials of stanzas #1 and 2, where the fish is joyously swimming, dominate the quintet, indicating that Schubert decided to let the fish escape and flourish in the quintet.

The Piano quintet in A “The Trout”, which was commissioned with the request that it be based on the Lied, was his answer to the above question. Schubart, but by eliminating the last stanza from the Lied, he left the music and the text mismatched at the end and also left the fate of the trout in question. Franz Schubert wrote his masterpiece, the Lied Die Forelle, from the namesake light-hearted imaginative poem by C.F.D.

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