Corpsed in Ivory

It is relatively unfashionable to listen to classical music. It is deeply unfashionable to be twenty-two and listen to classical music. It is embarrassingly unfashionable to be twenty-two and still be going on about the likes of Haydn. It bears no adjective to be twenty-two and going on about the likes of the pupils of Haydn. Yet, beloving Ignaz Pleyel is an act with such a dearth of popular merit that it starts to become almost singularly transgressive. Not that I am the bearer of some revolution; I don't even have the apparatus to do so. Chandos, part of the group that do, put out a series of recordings in the early 2000s under the name "Contemporaries of Mozart". This contemptuous-contemporaneity subsumed composers as diverse as Pleyel, Wranitzky, Vanhal, Gyrowetz, Hoffmeister. Hoffman debuted a flute concerto so similar to Haydn that it was actually misattributed by the publisher; the ripples still felt by the mistake are basically his legacy—yet, that does not feel as insulting as publishing a collection of recordings whose merit is pre-determined by the notion that they knew a guy. Leopold Mozart is relegated to the status of "contemporary" (not that he was much of a father) and Wagenseil is absolutely nowhere to be seen; no, it would probably be remiss to suggest that Mozart could've possibly had a mentor, that his so-called genius was not self-inherent. Besides opera, the domain he truly ruled in the 18th century, there is strikingly little that Mozart can claim that isn't met or bested by "his contemporaries"—as if they belonged to him—especially Vanhal whose thundery, tectonic symphonies do not deserve to be neglected as they are.

But here he is again anyway, at the centre of this piece. Like a negative, deconstructed centre of significance he always appears to wreak havoc. His legacy, his ghost if you like, is allowed to be dynamic because it is constituted in the canon. Canons are by their nature static, even if they let in new entries in past the sociocultural barrier on occasion, but they are also essentially phantoms hauntological in composition and thus always able to become something. This quasi-dynamism is exactly what makes its way into evocations of Mozart because his ghost is permitted to exist as an idea, an episteme. We don't tend to think of classical music as a product. Various suggestions have been thrown around by way of "European Art Music"—Villa-Lobos, Guerra-Peixe, Santoro, Ginastera, Takemitsu presumably uninvited—but syntactic or otherwise classical listeners are often very happy to distance themselves from commercial music. You are not being sold a commodity when you purchase the Deutsche Grammophon New Edition Of Mozart for £500, you are accessing art. A holographic photocard of the chap might've bolstered its resale value on eBay, but I suppose the big classical labels are not ken to the manufacturing of K-pop CDs and would rather stick to the opera house rules of fleecing middle-class people of hundreds of pounds to hear pieces they already know off by heart. I was looking at tickets to see a handful of popular Beethoven pieces at Norwich Theatre and they had sold out already; when I went to a Farrenc symphony the room was half full.

Where does everything else go, then, if not into canons or as phantoms? It's relatively simple to think of all classical music ever a canon in-itself insofar as it is afforded ideological significance over other types of music much of the time, but that would be giving far too much credit to the industry whose foundation is playlists of Chopin's excrement on shuffle For Study And Work. The non-Chopin-non-Mozarts are either subsumed into the word Classical or essentialised into the notion that they knew a guy. Nevermind that Pleyel was seriously seen as a successor to Haydn by the 1790s, including by Mozart; that Koželuch was so popular that he was considered a genuine rival to Mozart and Beethoven and despised by the latter. We can evoke the pair of them by saying the word Classical in either its generic or temporal sense and if that fails a test of recognition, "he was around when Mozart was around" will do. One imagines a raised eyebrow if they were to say to someone "Pleyel? He was around when Vanhal was around".

The reality is that these composers exist as an object, insofar as phantoms can at least be considered subjects to some degree. To bring Vanhal into existence as subject is almost an act of novelty—one does not have to go looking for Mozart since he is always-already there, but one must always go looking for Vanhal. Mapping the journey is impossible when the latter cannot be considered any kind of reasonable, socially useful anchor point, so one must reach for the nearest name that is supposed to analogise him while almost completely erasing him from utterance. True enough the word VANHAL is written in bold text on the album cover, but the subject's eyes will always be drawn first to the little ^Mozart in the top corner as the sign with which the strange, other name must be interpreted and thus become.

Pleyel lives a little less ephemerally, luckily. A renowned piano manufacturer and music publisher, his name bores deep into the wood and paper apparatuses of music. This is it however. There may be pianists who do not know their Pleyel et. Cie is named after a prolific composer; readers of music who do not know that the little ^{Maison Pleyel} in the top corner is no less significant than Artaria. Much more successfully than his contemporaries is his ghost able to survive within actual music rather than syntax; that of course means we are now on a secondary level of reification when it comes to "Contemporaries of Pleyel".

This survival is still not entirely wonderful. For if Pleyel survives it is still only his name which is finally irreducible. His existence in music is not the existence of his music, which is at all times spectacular, as a socially evocable idea. One could own a Pleyel and only ever play Spohr on it. One could fill a room playing Beethoven on it and empty it again playing Farrenc; the room is filled on the premise that the audience recognises the name by which the music is called, and a cursory look at some local music programmes quickly reveals it is never called Pleyel. At best he is something to do on a Friday evening. CPO, Naxos and Hungaraton have between them knocked up a decently large discography for him. Deutsche Grammophon have seemingly never bothered. Indeed, it took the obviously specialist International Ignaz Joseph Pleyel Society to begin a complete cycle of his works, with part of the project including engraving some of them from scratch because of a total absence of complete extant scores. The project began in 2008 with some genuinely heavy hitters making the bill: the Janacek Quartet's recording of his Parisian Quartets (elsewhere completely unknown) and string quintets are serious, high-quality, magnificent recordings that are not simply the sound of rare repertoire being drummed out for the sake of it. A beautiful blossoming of 17 CDs followed in just seven years.

A four year gap, then just one more. Nothing since 2019.

Chopin was known to have played on several Pleyels, one of which is sitting in the museum that bears his name, embalmed in wood polish as his heart is in Warsaw in Tokarczuk's novel. Only two layers of utterance separate two men who have retained legacies that could not be further apart. When one clicks on Three Hours Of Chopin For Work And Study they may never know their evening was composed on the ivories of a Pleyel. When I am dead, please do not put me on shuffle in that fucking piano.