Schubert leapt at PaumgartnerвЂ™s invitation to compose a companion piece and was delighted to accede to the only stipulation apart from the instrumentation: that the new work incorporate the melody of PaumgartnerвЂ™s favorite Schubert song, вЂњ Die ForelleвЂќ (The Trout), which had been written two years earlier and which tells the tale of a fisherman ensnaring a wriggling trout to an alarmed onlookerвЂ™s distress. Paumgartner seems to have been particularly enamored of a quintet by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (actually a quintet arrangement of his D minor Septet, Opus 74), the unusual instrumentation of which-violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano-apparently coincided with the forces provided by his fellow musical aficionados in Steyr. In any case, during that first trip they spent evenings making music at PaumgartnerвЂ™s home on the town square, a building that today is adorned with a historical marker identifying it as the site that gave rise to SchubertвЂ™s Trout Quintet. Actually, Vogl and Schubert did not lodge with him during their 1819 visit, although they would do so on both of their later trips to town. He held at-home musical soirГ©es in his house on the main square in Steyr, and Vogl sometimes stayed with him during his visits. He also was an amateur cellist, though it was said that he didnвЂ™t play very well. Paumgartner was a great music lover, and he possessed a notable collection of musical scores and instruments. The composer would recall the summer of 1819 as serenely happy, the days filled with hikes and picnics, the evenings with chamber music at the home of Sylvester Paumgartner, who was the assistant manager of iron mines in the region. In the summers of 1819, 1823, and 1825 Schubert accompanied Vogl on vacations to Upper Austria, where the singer still had a circle of friends.

Vogl, who was twenty-nine years SchubertвЂ™s elder, had been born in that area and since 1794 had performed as a baritone at the Court Opera in Vienna, where his distinctions included singing the role of Don Pizarro in the 1814 premiere of BeethovenвЂ™s Fidelio. In the summer of 1819, the twenty-two-year-old Franz Schubert (1797вЂ“1828) went on a vacation with his friend Johann Michael Vogl to Steyr in Upper Austria, a bit southeast of Linz, at the confluence of the rivers Steyr and Enns.

Action strings seating arrangment