Schubert was 22 when he wrote it for Sylvester Paumgartner, a rich amateur cellist and patron of music in the town of Steyr, Upper Austria. It was Paumgartner’s idea to include variations on Schubert’s song “Die Forelle” (The Trout). According to Schubert’s friend Albert Stadler, the line-up with double bass was modelled on an arrangement of Hummel’s Septet, a popular piece at the time. Schubert’s manuscript is lost; the quintet was published in Vienna by Josef Czerny in 1829, the year after Schubert died.
There are five movements instead of the usual four. The fourth is the set of variations on the song: each variation hands the tune to a different player, and Schubert dresses it up and changes its mood rather than developing it. A quick upward rush of notes from the song’s piano part comes back again and again across the whole quintet.
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