Ignaz Joseph Pleyel was born on 18 June 1757 at Ruppersthal in Lower Austria, the eighth and last child of a schoolmaster’s first marriage. He probably studied with Johann Baptist Wanhal while still young, and from 1772 was Haydn’s pupil at Eisenstadt under the sponsorship of Count Ladislaus Erdődy; Haydn thought him a superb student. His apprentice work includes the puppet opera Die Fee Urgele of 1776, given in the marionette theatre at Eszterháza and in Vienna, and at least part of the overture to Haydn’s Das abgebrannte Haus. He visited Italy in the early 1780s and moved to Strasbourg in 1783 to work under Franz Xaver Richter at the cathedral, which had a full orchestra, a choir and a substantial budget; he took French citizenship in effect by calling himself Ignace, married Françoise-Gabrielle Lefebvre in 1788, and succeeded Richter as maître de chapelle in 1789. He died on 14 November 1831.

The decade at Strasbourg was his most productive, and he programmed his own symphonies concertantes and liturgical music in the cathedral’s concerts. When the Revolution abolished both church music and public concerts in 1791 he went to London to direct Wilhelm Cramer’s Professional Concerts, which put him — inadvertently — in direct competition with Haydn, then leading Salomon’s rival series. He later founded a music publishing house and a piano factory in Paris that carried the family name well beyond his lifetime; his son Camille ran the firm, and Camille’s wife Marie Pleyel, née Moke, became one of the leading pianists of her generation.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Pleyel
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q314019