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 Ha