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Which instruments are featured in Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet?
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Franz Schubert
Portrait of Franz Schubert, oil on wood by Gábor Melegh, 1827; in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.
Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet (Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 114) is notable for its unusual instrumentation. Unlike most piano quintets, which are typically written for a piano and a string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello), Schubert’s work features the following five instruments:
This specific combination was requested by the patron Sylvester Paumgartner, who commissioned the piece based on the instrumentation used in an earlier quintet by Johann Nepomuk Hummel.12