Sunday Classics preview: The best-known of all musical swimmers, Schubert's "Trout"

Schubert's "Trout" gets a robust, energetic performance by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, matched by an especially adroit, buoyant account of the piano part by Gerald Moore. The maker of the video clip, FiDiTanzer528, helpfully rigged it out with the original German text by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart and an English translation.

by Ken

We've actually covered some of this territory before, but I think that was when we were at the mercy of found musical clips, and it's been my intention to do at least a somewhat more proper job of it.

"Die Forelle" is perhaps the simplest of the best-loved Schubert songs, and even underplays the dark turn it takes in the third and final stanza. The composer dressed it up elaborately when he repurposed it into the Theme and Variations movement of the quintet we know as the Trout, for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, written when he was 22, but he didn't try to inflate the song's emotional scale.


TO HEAR SCHUBERT'S "TROUT" DONE TWO WAYS, CLICK HERE

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