Ignaz Pleyel
was a highly talented composer in the second half of the 18th, respectively the beginning of the 19th century, born on June 18, 1757 in the little Austrian village Ruppersthal. Therefore, he was a child of the epoque of Maria Theresia, Joseph I, and Leopold with all its political complications, a real contemporary of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714 - 1787), Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791). His manifold compositions, especially the chamber music works, are characterised by ingenuity and amicable musical noblesse. The musicologist Klingenbeck wrote 1928 in his dissertation that Pleyel "has been the most famous, most beloved and most performed composer ever lived in the world during ... ."