Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831)
String Quartets, Op. 2 Nos. 1-3
The string quartets of Ignaz Pleyel occupy a central
place in his prolific musical output. Pleyel’s interest in
the medium is unsurprising given that he studied with
Joseph Haydn for several years in the 1770s. What is
more surprising in a composer routinely dismissed as
derivative and largely content to ape the style of his
teacher is that Haydn’s influence on his approach to
quartet composition was rather less marked than one
might expect. Pleyel, clearly, was not convinced that
Haydn had all the answers and this doubt manifested
itself very early in his career.
In 1776 Pleyel completed his studies with Haydn
and enjoyed a great personal triumph with the
successful staging of his marionette opera Die Fee
Urgèle at the National Theater in Vienna. An
appointment as Kapellmeister to Count Erdödy soon
followed and for a time at least Pleyel seemed set to
pursue a similar professional path to Haydn. The
musical resources at his disposal were excellent and
Erdödy himself was an exceptionally generous and
cultivated patron. Nonetheless, much to his surprise,
Pleyel requested extended leave of absence as early as
1778 on the grounds that he needed to undertake further
studies to perfect his art. After prolonged discussion
Pleyel was granted leave and headed off to Italy where
he spent much of the next few years travelling
extensively, composing and experiencing Italian
musical life at first hand. Pleyel’s Italian experiences
exerted a powerful influence on his evolution as a
composer. Like Mozart he possessed an uncanny ability
to assimilate stylistic influences and his profound
understanding of the nuances of the Italian style is
nowhere more evident than in his opera Ifigenia in
Aulide composed in 1785 for the Teatro San Carlo in
Naples. While one might reasonably expect to see such
influences in the realm of opera – for opera so
dominated Italian musical life that to ignore its styles
and conventions would be to court disaster – Pleyel’s
fascination with Italian music ran far deeper and it left
indelible traces in many of his instrumental works
including the string quartets.
We do not know when Pleyel first began to
compose string quartets although in at least one early
biographical sketch it is claimed that he took several
manuscript quartets with him to Italy. These works,
which remain unidentified, may have been composed
during his years with Haydn or perhaps during his time
as Kapellmeister to Count Erdödy. Whichever the case,
Pleyel’s earliest quartets were composed during
Haydn’s so-called ‘Quartettenpause’, the nearly
decade-long interval between the composition of the
epochal Op. 20 Quartets and the brilliant quartets of
Op. 33. With the completion of the Op. 20 Quartets in
1772 Haydn recognized that he had reached a major
artistic impasse. He had immeasurably expanded the
emotional and intellectual horizons of the medium but
he had done so using means that he felt offered limited
potential for further development. His response was to
stop composing quartets until he had found a way
forward. Mozart, who had quickly written a set of six
quartets in imitation of Op. 20, famously followed suit.
Pleyel, then, found himself in an unusual position. He
had studied with the most famous composer of quartets
in Europe and yet was aware, as probably no one else
was, that Haydn himself was unconvinced that his finest
works to date represented the best way to compose
string quartets. With no answer forthcoming from
Haydn (Mozart would not have figured in his thinking
at this time) Pleyel turned to other models, notably
Haydn’s earlier quartets, and in particular the Op. 17
Quartets of 1771, the quartets of his first teacher,
Johann Baptist Wanhal, and, less obviously, to the
works of Italian composers whose clarity, elegance and
lyricism he found captivating. Above all, Pleyel looked
to himself to find a solution, one in which his own
musical voice would be heard over that of his teacher.
That he succeeded in large measure was recognized by
Mozart who, on seeing a set of recently published
quartets [probably the Op. 1 set which was issued in
1784], commended them enthusiastically to his father:
You will find them worth the trouble. They are very well
written and most pleasing to listen to. You will also see
at once who was his master. Well, it will be a lucky day
for music if later on Pleyel should be able to replace
Haydn.
Pleyel composed the majority of his 57 authentic
string quartets in less than a decade. Unsurprisingly,
there is a high degree of stylistic consistency within the
series and a number of important characteristics can be
seen. The most obvious of these is Pleyel’s preference
for a three-movement rather than a four- movement
cycle. This represents a radical departure from Haydn’s
model although three-movement quartets – and
symphonies for that matter – were extremely common
during the late eighteenth century. Another interesting
tendency in Pleyel’s quartets is the reduction in the
length of the development section in sonata-form
movements in the later quartets. This contraction and
the growing emphasis on lyricism rather than thematic
manipulation represents a conscious rejection of
Haydn’s approach to large-scale musical construction
but one that is also inextricably linked to Pleyel’s
fondness for concertante writing with its demand for
simpler musical textures and his cultivation of an
intensely lyrical style.
The six String Quartets Op. 2 were first published
in 1784 by the Viennese publisher Graeffer with a
dedication to Haydn. Haydn’s opinion of the works is
not known but he must have been impressed by their
rich variety of thematic material and the flexibility and
imagination with which Pleyel handled his musical
structures. The first movement of the fifth quartet, for
example, contains a false reprise that forces substantial
recomposition in the recapitulation and there are at least
two examples of mirror recapitulations where the main
theme resurfaces only during the closing stages of the
movement (the first and second movements of the first
quartet). Significantly, all but one of the works are in
three movements: the exception is the fourth quartet in
E flat which adds a brief 29-bar Minuet between its slow
movement and finale. The slow movements are directed
to be played con sordini, a favourite device of Pleyel
and one he would have encountered on numerous
occasions in the music of his teacher. They are very
Italianate in flavour with their beautiful first-violin
cantilena and one can imagine Luigi Tomasini, the
leader of Haydn’s orchestra and the man whom he
considered the best interpreter of his quartets, playing
these movements with relish. The most interesting
structurally of the slow movements is that of the sixth
quartet. The first fifty odd bars of the movement suggest
variation style and structure (as do the sectional
headings in the source), but the main theme is not really
varied at all despite its obvious thematic promise.
Instead, the movement unfolds as a series of couplets,
each focusing on a different instrument, only the first of
which stays in the tonic. With the reprise of the theme in
between (minus repeats) and the gradually diminishing
surface rhythms typical of the variation style, the
movement becomes an extended variation-cum-rondo
structure, a derivative perhaps of Haydn’s characteristic
alternating or double variation form. Pleyel’s harmonic
language is also striking at times with some lovely
chromatic shadings and also a number of unexpected
modulations including the juxtaposition of third-related
keys which was to become one of the most important
hallmarks of Haydn’s late style.
The ghostly presence of Haydn can be heard
throughout all these splendid works but there are
passages too that seem to look forward to the quartets of
Beethoven. They are a remarkable achievement for a
young composer and it is one of the cruel quirks of fate
that works of such vitality and imagination could be
forgotten for so long.
Allan Badley