Tonight the four of us got together around the grand piano
and had at the Trout Theme and Variations again.
God help me, I sound SO BAD
and they are so nice to me.

The violinist discharges in about ten days' time to go back to school. So if we are going to perform this thing here, we have to do it soon, before we lose the violinist.
Don't know if it will happen or not --
but the violin player is game, and she will talk to somebody.


OH! I didn't tell you about the Trout?! Sorry ...
It's the Forelle Quintette, Forelle is German for Trout.
Franz Schubert. First, he wrote charming music to a truly atrocious poem
about how sorry the poet is to see the angler hook the trout.
Then, he took the charming tune and music
and wrote a theme and variations on it, with NO singing:
violin,
viola,
cello,
double-bass viol,
and piano.

Well, we don't have a double-bass player.
It's just the four of us.
So I play the piano part in one hand mostly
and in the other hand I alternate the double-bass bass line
and the rest of the piano part.
The classical music purists would have apoplexy.
But this makes it possible
for the violin, viola, and cello players, my fellow patients,
to play this spirited music,
and it's worth it to see them enjoying themselves and each other.

We're just doing the Theme and Variations which amounts to
one internal movement out of five movements total:
the entire Forelle Quintette is a long difficult piece,
especially hard on the seated rear end, I can tell you.
But this one movement doesn't last long
(for all the hard work we put into it)
and it's easy on the audience's ears
(if we don't utterly butcher it, that is).