Arpeggione sonate - Forellen quintet

Joy in playing and emotional intensity in Schubert’s Trout Quintet and Arpeggione Sonata. Even though the Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) may have grown up in a family that had its own buit-in string quartet, he nonetheless did not develop into someone who would write a large amount of chamber music; his songs were the only form of music that he composed in large quantity. That he never managed to ceate such an amount of chamber music must have had a lot to do with Beethoven’s overwhelming presence in Vienna. Schubert had already made cautious attempts to compose a few string quartets at the age of thirteen and, as we would expect from a Viennese, he modelled them on Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets. We can see clearly from Schubert’s works that he realised around 1817 that sooner or later he would have to measure himself against Beethoven. Schubert’s list of compositions shows a surprising fall-off in chamber music around that time and we should also note that a large amount of the works that he commenced at that time were to remain unfinished; one such example is the Quartettsatz D 703 from 1820. The Trout Quintet, however, is the exception that proves the rule.