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The French piano firm Pleyel et Cie was founded by the composer Ignace Pleyel (1757-1831) and continued by his son Camille (1788-1855), a piano virtuoso who became his father's business partner as of 1815. The firm provided pianos used by Frédéric Chopin, and also ran a concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, in which Chopin performed his first — and also his last — Paris concerts. Pleyel's major contribution to the development piano was the first use of a metal frame in a piano. Toward the end of the 19th century, the Pleyel firm produced the first chromatic harp. In the early 20th century, at the behest of Wanda Landowska, it helped to revive the harpsichord. Pleyel pianos were the choice of composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, de Falla and Stravinsky and of the pianist and teacher Alfred Cortot.
Pleyel also pioneered the player piano with the Pleyela line of pianos. These were often very small pianos of a very unusual design. (History of Pleyel and their pianos with many pictures and details.)
Pleyel was in fact the first to introduce the upright piano to France, adapting the best features of pianos built in Britain – an astute business decision as it brought pianos to a wider market. They introduced these pianos by 1815. Their pianos were such a success that in 1834 the company boasted 250 employees and an annual production of 1000 pianos.
The Double Piano was the rather extravagant whim of the Parisian firm of Pleyel. The company's success led them to invest in experiments, resulting in 1890 with a Double Piano. Although not the first company to experiment with building two pianos into the same frame, Pleyel (who patented it as "Duo-Clave") was by far the most successful and produced the largest instruments. A very small number of Double Pianos were manufactured in the 1890s and continued to be made until the 1920s. CDs can be bought today of performances on some of these pianos.
Pleyel continues to manufacture pianos today, under the corporate auspices of the Manufacture Française de Pianos company. In the 1980s the Pleyel company bought out the Erard and Graveu piano companies which also manufactured pianos in France. (Erard was the favorite piano of Liszt, and invented many improvements in piano actions.) The Pleyel pianos of today incorporate improvements of these companies and others. In the last two decades Pleyel Piano was bought by the same family which had bought the Salle Pleyel concert hall. They bought it because they wanted to revive the name and quality of Pleyel pianos. They built a new factory in the south of France and started making a line of newly designed and improved pianos. Then in 2008 they decided to downsize the factory and lines of pianos. They moved the factory back to Paris and opened a new factory. Their new goal is to make among the finest pianos in the world and return to a history of making designer artcase pianos. In 2008 they began introducing new pianos designed by famous designers. The very colorful factory store on the web and at the Salle Pleyel have the new pianos.
The red spruce used by Pleyel and several other top manufacturers comes from the Fiemme Valley in province of Trento, Italy. Piano-makers are extremely fussy about this. "It has to be from a north-facing tree," explained Sylvan Charles, a master piano builder who supervises the 15 workers in Pleyel's Paris workshop. "The tree has to be a certain age. The direction of the grain and the thickness are also important, but I won’t tell you any more because that is the secret of our sound." He described the Pleyel sound as "round, warm and sensual." Steinway, by contrast, is known for its bright, powerful "singing" sound.
After a piano is fully assembled, it is moved into a voicing room where an expert with a very arcane assortment of tools will spend some 30 to 40 hours fine-tuning the instrument. "When it comes in here, it is not yet a Pleyel," said Charles, striking a note on a newly arrived piano. "See, that’s a Yamaha sound – very sharp and metallic. But when it leaves this room, it will be a Pleyel."
In 1913 Pleyel built the "Jungle Piano" for use by Albert Schweitzer in his hospital in Lambaréné (French Equatorial Africa - now Gabon). It was fitted pedal attachments (to operate like an organ pedal-keyboard) and built with tropical woods that would acclimate to conditions there.
Notes
- French, "Pleyel and company"
- Pleyel of Paris newsletter:
- Quoted from the Chicage Tribune, April 30, 2008]
External links
- Pleyel pianos
- 21st century update on pianos & company
- Salle Pleyel, a Paris concert hall built in the late 1920s
- A web site on Pleyel pianos by Stephen Birkett of the University of Waterloo; includes pictures of Pleyel and of historical Pleyel pianos
- Pleyel in the grand piano - Photoarchive
- Salle Pleyel Renewed with biography
- Museum in France with info. about French pianos
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001 s.v., Pleyel (ii), pp. 923-924
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