Pleyel & the Pirates.pdf - ResearchSpace@Auckland

worship at the altar of High Art. His decision to write music that differed in its
complexity to that of Haydn and Mozart has been seen as a failure on his part or even a
betrayal of his great talent. Landon’s use of an adjective like ‘nauseous’ strays far beyond
objective criticism and into the realm of the highly subjective. The received view of the
history of late eighteenth-century music has until recently been formed largely by the
spectacular achievements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, a Vienna-centric view if you
will. Pleyel too belonged to that tradition but critically he worked outside Vienna for
virtually his entire career. He did not work in the isolated splendour of Ezsterháza where
Haydn was forced ‘to become original’ but in Strasbourg and Paris with their vibrant
musical lives and strong local traditions. The composers he competed with for the support
and affection of the public were figures such as Carl Stamitz, Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier
de Saint Georges and François Devienne and there is little doubt that Pleyel’s music
quickly eclipsed their own in popularity. To buck fashion and tradition would have been
to court professional and financial disaster before the Revolution and personal danger
after it as art became increasingly democratic. Pleyel was brought before the Committee
of Public Safety on seven occasions in the aftermath of the Revolution. The reasons for
this were varied but they were all potentially dangerous. As a musician, he had strong ties
with both the aristocracy and the church and this made him suspect in the eyes of the
Committee. Worse, he was a foreigner, an Austrian, like the hated Marie Antoinette. His
categorization as a Royalist Collaborator could easily have earned him a term of
imprisonment or a trip to the guillotine but with prudent opportunism he survived and
later flourished.
Pleyel’s artistic conscience may not have been troubled in the least by simplifying his
style in order to write music that was agreeable to his public but, as in all matters of
conscience, we can never know.
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