3. Schubert’s Quintets, a Family Portrait

This chapter braids personal and family history through Schubert's two great quintets, the Quintet in C major and the "Trout," using both as case studies in how memory, misremembering, and inheritance shape musical reception. Anchored by the author's father's 1985 memorial service, at which the Quintet in C was performed, the chapter interrogates a cherished but largely fabricated family memory — that the author's grandfather listened to the piece repeatedly on a Victrola while dying — unraveling it through census records, family testimony, and mismatched historical details to demonstrate how thoroughly personal narratives about art can rest on invented or distorted foundations, even when the underlying emotional truth (a real, cross-generational attachment to the piece) persists. Alongside this runs a companion narrative built around the "Trout" Quintet as the sonic emblem of childhood summers in Vermont, exploring how music, place, and sensory memory (smells, "views," a particular 1953 album cover) fuse into inseparable, idiosyncratic wholes that resist any claim to represent a generalizable listening experience — a claim tested against Manfred Clynes's "sentograph" experiments, which suggested, in contrast to the chapter's core argument, that responses to composers may cluster in shared, near-universal patterns.The chapter widens outward from family anecdote into broader questions about musical meaning and closure — comparing the finales of both quintets as differently "marked" (Czech-rustic versus Hungarian/Romani) and using this to raise unresolved questions about appropriation, exoticism, and who has standing to hear or tell such music's implicit stories — while returning throughout to the impossibility of separating aesthetic response from autobiography, illustrated by testimony from musicians who performed at the memorial service, a stray Tom Selleck film scene built around a Brahms Intermezzo, and a mysterious, unexplained manuscript fragment of the Quintet's theme found in the author's own handwriting. The chapter closes at the author's parents' house being emptied for renovation, listening to the "Trout" on a phone speaker eighty years after his grandfather's deathbed encounter with its sister quintet — a meditation on inheritance, impermanence, and the way lighter and darker histories alike accumulate around a piece of music without ever fully resolving into a single, shared meaning.