Reputation and Assessment
Pleyel is one instance of the phenomenon of a composer (others include Cherubini, Meyerbeer, and Thalberg) who was very famous in his own time but presently obscure. Keefe (2005) describes a "craze for his music c. 1780–1800", and quotes a number of contemporary witnesses to this surge. For instance François-Joseph Fétis wrote, "What composer ever created more of a craze than Pleyel? Who enjoyed a more universal reputation or a more absolute domination of the field of instrumental music? Over more than twenty years, there was no amateur or professional musician who did not delight in his genius."
Pleyel's fame even reached the then-remote musical regions of America: there was a Pleyel Society on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts, and tunes by Pleyel made their way into the then-popular shape note hymnals. Pleyel's work is twice represented in the principal modern descendant of these books, The Sacred Harp.
In his own time, Pleyel's reputation rested at least in part on the undemanding character of his music. A reviewer writing in the Morning Herald of London (1791) said that Pleyel "is becoming even more popular then his master, as his works are characterized less by the intricacies of science than the charm of simplicity and feeling."
Pleyel continues to be known today as a composer of didactic music: generations of beginning violin and flute students, for example, learn to play the numerous duets he wrote for those instruments.
Read more about this topic: Ignaz Pleyel
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