Die Forelle

Die Forelle, song setting for voice and piano by Franz Schubert, composed about 1817 (with later revisions), with words by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. It is among the most familiar of Schubert’s approximately 600 songs, and it is best known as the basis for the theme of the fourth movement of Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major, better known as the Trout Quintet.

The song’s lyrics were written from the perspective of an onlooker on a riverbank taking pleasure in watching the “happy little fish” swimming in the river. Soon a fisherman arrives and, much to the onlooker’s dismay, catches the trout. (For his song, Schubert eliminated Schubart’s final moralizing verse.) Here, as he had in “Erlkönig,” Schubert displays his mastery of the genre by using the music to convey the viewer’s emotions—first pleasure in the creature’s freedom and then dismay and anger while empathizing with the dying fish.

Schubart’s poem, as edited by Schubert, is reproduced below, in the original German.

In einem Bächlein helle,
Da schoss in froher Eil’
Die launische Forelle
Vorueber wie ein Pfeil.
Ich stand an dem Gestade
Und sah in süsser Ruh’
Des muntern Fishleins Bade
Im klaren Bächlein zu.


Ein Fischer mit der Rute
Wohl an dem Ufer stand,
Und sah’s mit kaltem Blute
Wie sich das Fischlein wand.
So lang dem Wasser helle
So dacht’ ich, nicht gebricht,
So fängt er die Forelle
Mit seiner Angel nicht.


Doch endlich ward dem Diebe
Die Zeit zu lang.
Er macht das Bächlein tückisch trübe,
Und eh’ ich es gedacht
So zuckte seine Rute
Das Fischlein zappelt dran,
Und ich mit regem Blute
Sah die Betrog’ne an.

The English translation also makes clear the observer’s sympathy for and identification with the fish:

In a clear little brook,
There darted, about in happy haste,
The moody trout
Dashing everywhere like an arrow.
I stood on the bank
And watched, in sweet peace,
The fish’s bath
In the clear little brook.


A fisherman with his gear
Came to stand on the bank
And watched with cold blood
As the little fish weaved here and there.
But as long as the water remains clear,
I thought, no worry,
He’ll never catch the trout
With his hook.


But finally, for the thief,
Time seemed to pass too slowly.
He made the little brook murky,
And before I thought it could be,
So his line twitched.
There thrashed the fish,
And I, with raging blood,
Gazed on the betrayed one.