1757–1831 · France · Classical
Ignaz Pleyel (1757–1831) was a composer and publisher who was born in Austria and spent most of his life in France. He studied with Joseph Haydn, wrote symphonies, quartets and duets, published other composers' music, and later founded a firm making the pianos that Chopin played.
Pleyel was born near Vienna, in Ruppersthal, on 18 June 1757. His father, Martin Pleyel, was a schoolmaster, and the family had many children. The boy began music in his youth, probably learning the violin and piano with Johann Baptist Vanhal.
From 1772 Pleyel studied composition with Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt. As was the custom at the time, the pupil lived in his teacher's house, and the lessons lasted until 1777. His education was paid for by aristocrats who believed in the young man's talent, among them Count Ladislaus Erdődy. Haydn considered Pleyel a superb student.
The first experiments date from those years. In 1776 Pleyel wrote the puppet opera Die Fee Urgele, which was put on in Vienna and in the puppet theatre of the Eszterháza palace. It seems he also contributed a portion of the overture to Haydn's opera Das abgebrannte Haus.
Pleyel later perfected his skills in Italy, where he made friends with many well-known composers, among them Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. There he wrote the opera Ifigenia in Aulide, which was successfully staged in Naples in 1785, as well as works commissioned by Ferdinand I, the king of Naples. Among his early publications were six string quartets issued as Opus 1.
In 1783 Pleyel moved to Strasbourg in France to work at the cathedral, which kept a full orchestra and a choir and spent generously on concerts. He worked alongside Franz Xaver Richter in the cathedral's music, and after Richter's death in 1789 he took charge of it himself. At the cathedral he arranged concerts of his symphonies concertantes and his liturgical music. In Strasbourg his output was larger than at any other time in his career, and he took the French form of his first name, Ignace.
In 1788 Pleyel married Françoise-Gabrielle Lefebvre, whose father was a carpet weaver in Strasbourg. Their eldest child was their son Camille, later a pianist and his father's business partner. Camille's wife, Marie Pleyel, née Moke (1811–1875), ranked among the finest pianists of her day.
After the Revolution banned church music and public concerts, Pleyel left for London in 1791. From 1791 to 1792 he conducted the concerts of the Professional Concerts society there, a series run by Wilhelm Cramer. This put him, without intending it, in competition with his own teacher: at the same moment Haydn was directing the concerts arranged by Johann Peter Salomon. They competed professionally yet remained on friendly terms.
Pleyel grew rich in London, as Haydn did. When he went back to Strasbourg he purchased the Château d'Ittenwiller, a big moated house some 35 km to the south of the city, in the Bas-Rhin department.
In 1793 and 1794, during the Terror, life in France became dangerous. Pleyel was summoned seven times by the Committee of Public Safety: he was a foreigner, had recently bought a château and had ties with Strasbourg Cathedral. He was even labelled a collaborator with the royalists. He kept his standing by writing a handful of works honouring the new republic. He took French citizenship and came to be called Citizen Pleyel. The works that were most popular in his lifetime were the ones that responded to the revolutionary events: the Hymn to Liberty (1791), to words by Rouget de Lisle, and the monumental symphony Revolution of 10 August, or the Allegorical Tocsin, for choir, orchestra and seven bells.
The works of those years include La Prise de Toulon (1794), a hymn sung in the Temple of Reason, and the Hymn to the Supreme Being (performed on 8 June 1794). Many of them had their premieres at Strasbourg Cathedral, which during the Terror was called the Temple of the Supreme Being. Pleyel also wrote for the Paris stage: on 5 March 1793 his music was heard, alongside that of Haydn and Méhul, in Gardel's pantomime-ballet Le Jugement de Pâris.
From 1795 Pleyel lived in Paris. In 1797 he set up the music publishing house Maison Pleyel, which operated for 39 years and put out roughly 4,000 works. Among them were Haydn's string quartets in a complete edition (1801) and the earliest miniature scores intended for study, issued in the Bibliothèque musicale series. Pleyel also published Boccherini, Beethoven, Clementi, Hummel and Mozart, as well as Adolphe Adam, Johann Baptist Cramer, Jan Ladislav Dussek and Georges Onslow. At the same time he worked with Dussek on a piano tutor, the Méthode pour le piano forte.
In 1805 Pleyel visited Vienna on business. There he met his elderly teacher Haydn for the last time and heard Beethoven play.
Later Pleyel set up the piano-making firm Pleyel et Cie. In 1815 his son Camille joined the business. Fryderyk Chopin used the firm's instruments and rated Pleyel pianos the finest. In 1829 Pleyel and his son Camille were named piano makers to the king. A concert hall belonging to the firm, the Salle Pleyel, was where Chopin gave both his first and his last Paris concerts.
In 2009 the maker Paul McNulty built a copy of a Pleyel piano of the 1830 model. Today it belongs to the collection of the Chopin Institute in Warsaw and was played at the first international competition for pianists on period instruments.
Commercial success gradually led Pleyel to stop composing, although in his first years in France he had written a great deal. In his lifetime he was very famous: Keefe, in a work of 2005, describes the enthusiasm for his music from about 1780 to 1800 as a craze. Today his name is far less well known.
Pleyel stepped back from business in 1824 and settled in the countryside some 50 km from Paris. By the end of his life he knew that Romanticism had pushed his style aside. Ignaz Pleyel died on 14 November 1831, and his grave is in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Pleyel wrote a great deal, with no fewer than 42 symphonies, 70 string quartets and several operas to his name. Much of this belongs to his Strasbourg years; once business took over, his output dropped. He also wrote liturgical music and music for masonic rituals.
Pleyel's music is marked by elegance and beautiful melodies, and Mozart appreciated his string quartets. A London reviewer wrote in 1791 that his works won people over by simplicity and feeling rather than learned intricacy. In his lifetime his reputation rested partly on how undemanding his music was.
Pleyel is still known as a composer of teaching music: generations of beginning violinists and flautists have learned from his many duets for those instruments. The harpsichord maker Wolfgang Zuckermann, who as a child played in a family quartet, recalled that Pleyel was the only music simple enough for their group. Recent research suggests that the theme of the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a, was most likely written not by Haydn but by Pleyel.
The pieces that brought Pleyel the most popularity in his lifetime were those on revolutionary themes. One is the Hymn to Liberty (1791), set to words by Rouget de Lisle; another is the monumental Allegorical Tocsin, also called Revolution of 10 August, which calls for choir, orchestra and seven bells. The works he wrote during the Terror helped him keep his position. One theme of the Hymn to Liberty has something in common with the opening of the finale of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Pleyel's music travelled as far as America. The island of Nantucket had a Pleyel Society, and tunes by him found their way into the shape note tunebooks that were then popular. His work is also represented in The Sacred Harp, the main modern descendant of those books.
Pleyel is one of the composers who were very famous in their own time but are little known today, like Cherubini, Meyerbeer and Thalberg. By the end of his life he apparently understood that Romanticism had displaced his style.
Pleyel composed most in his Strasbourg period, 1783–1793. For the cathedral he organised concerts that included his symphonies concertantes and church music. Later, commercial affairs gradually drew him away from composing.