Ruppersthal, a picturesque village in the Weinviertel of Lower Austria and the birthplace of Ignaz Pleyel, is also the home of the Internationale Ignaz Joseph Pleyel Gesellschaft. Since 2007 the IPG and its partner the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz – Institut Oberschüzten (Kunst Universität Graz) have organized a series of biennial symposia devoted to the composer's life and works. The fifth symposium was to have been held in 2015, but was delayed to 2016 in order that it might coincide with the opening of the new Pleyel Kulturzentrum in Ruppersthal. Intended primarily as a performance venue, the Pleyel Kulturzentrum will also house an extensive and expanding archive of source material for the Pleyel Gesamtausgabe. The small but handsome new building occupies part of the vineyard that once belonged to Martin Pleyl, the composer's father, and overlooks the Aegidiuskirche, where he served for many years as organist and music director. Held over two days, the 2016 symposium was divided between sessions devoted to Pleyel and to his teacher, Johann Baptist Wanhal. An additional session on the second day was reserved for a roundtable discussion on matters concerning the edition.

The first session opened with my (Allan Badley, University of Auckland) paper ‘From Airs without Graces to Songs without Words: Thomson, Pleyel and the Scottish Tradition’, in which I placed George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice within the context of Scottish song collecting in the eighteenth century and examined Pleyel's involvement as arranger in the first volume in the series (1793). Drawing on the extensive correspondence between Thomson and Leopold Kozeluch, Pleyel's immediate successor in this ambitious project, I extrapolated from this the likely form that Thomson's guidelines to Pleyel took and discussed how these are reflected in both his arrangements and his treatment of a number of these airs and other traditional Scots melodies in the accompanied sonatas (Benton 443–454) that Thomson commissioned at the same time. Using as case studies the air ‘In April when primroses paint the sweet plain’ (better known as ‘The Yellow-Hair'd Laddie’) and its quotation in the Andante of the Sonata in F major (Benton 444), I showed that Pleyel reveals in the sonata movement a sensitivity to the dramatic nuances of the text that transcends the simple musical setting of the air. I argued that his understanding of Allan Ramsay's text was far from superficial and that he brought to both parts of Thomson's commission quite distinct objectives as a composer.

In his paper ‘Beata es virgo Maria: Eine Aria Pleyels für das Stift Rein?’ Klaus Hubmann (Kunst Universität Graz) proposed that the composer's setting of the text ‘Beata es virgo Maria’ was made specifically for the Cistercian Monastery in Rein (Styria), which owns the only known copy. Pleyel's presence in Graz in 1805 has long been known through his involvement in a concert there that also featured the young Italian violinist Giovanni Battista Polledro (1781–1853). However, a letter written by Pleyel in Graz on 31 August 1805 proves that he spent at least a month there during his first visit to Austria since the French Revolution. Hubmann argued that this gave him ample time to compose ‘Beata es virgo Maria’ for the Marian Feast Day on 8 September. The work's scoring includes clarinets, which were still not uniformly employed in Austrian sacred music, but an inventory of instruments at Stift Rein shows that the Kapelle did own pairs of clarinets in B flat and C around 1800. One further Pleyel sacred aria is preserved at Stift Rein: this is based on an aria from Pleyel's 1785 opera Ifigenia in Aulide and is known from several other sources.

Michaela Freemanová (Akademie věd České republiky) was unfortunately not able to attend the symposium in person, and her paper ‘Ignace Pleyel's Works in the Bohemian Lands: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Dissemination’ was read by Halvor Hosar (University of Auckland). Pleyel's music enjoyed a similar popularity to Haydn's in the Bohemian lands during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Copies of his works were disseminated widely in both manuscript and early printed editions and are to be found in many of the same collections as those of Haydn. The continuing popularity of his works in Bohemia is evidenced by performances of both symphonies and chamber music until well into the nineteenth century. Freemanová drew particular attention, however, to a group of symphonies once owned by the Pachta family. Produced in Prague on paper of Bohemian origin, the copies of symphonies Benton 122, 124, 126, 128 and 132 represent unusually important sources for these works.

Christoph Kammertöns (Robert Schumann Hochschule, Düsseldorf) – ‘Biographische Offenheit und Unabgeschlossenheit am Beispiel von Ignaz Pleyels’ (Biographical Candour and Incompleteness in the Case of Ignaz Pleyel) – presented one of two papers with a biographical dimension. Broadly philosophical in tone and at times somewhat impenetrable, Kammertöns’ main argument was that Pleyel's flexibility and pragmatism both as an artist and as a man was to some extent driven by external circumstances, but that he also possessed a quality common to many gifted individuals of seeing possibilities that others do not. While his paper did not present any new biographical information, it did offer a different perspective on aspects of the composer's character through considering certain actions in a wider socio-historical context.

The second biographically themed paper, ‘Pleyel in Italien’ (Klaus Aringer, Kunst Universität Graz), presented a re-evaluation of the evidence relating to the dating of Pleyel's Italian journeys, and discussed the works he is known to have composed there as well as the influence Italian music had on his development as a composer. Aringer emphasized that the Italianate style of Pleyel and other composers offers an alternative to Viennese classicism, their music reflecting a broader European sensibility that ultimately contributed to the emergence of a pan-European style. The composer's appreciation of the Italian instrumental style came early, and Aringer highlighted the significance of Pleyel's preface to the Op. 1 string quartets in which he relates to the works’ dedicatee, Count Ladislaus Erdödy, how he had consciously adapted his style to the local taste. In discussing the works for lira organizzata that Pleyel composed in Naples for Ferdinand IV, Aringer drew particular attention to the incomplete autograph score of the Notturno (1786) and the valuable insights it gives into Pleyel's compositional process.

Papers on Johann Baptist Wanhal occupied the opening session of the symposium's second day. The first of these was my ‘The Source of the Nile: Kauer, Wanhal and Die grosse Seeschlacht bei Abukir’, which identified the sources of information about this famous naval engagement and how these were used in constructing the programmes for both Wanhal's work and Ferdinand Kauer's earlier Nelsons grosse Seeschlacht. Although the two composers drew on the fullest account of the battle, published in the Wiener Zeitung on 24 October 1798, Wanhal continued to follow the story closely after this date. Whereas Kauer's programme slavishly follows the newspaper account, Wanhal's reveals a greater creative independence through its inclusion of episodes that are clearly of his own devising. Pieces like Die grosse Seeschlacht bei Abukir have frequently been cited as proof that in later life Wanhal all too often produced meretricious works for the sole purpose of making money. This view lacks nuance, and in the present case there are strong grounds to believe that Die grosse Seeschlacht bei Abukir reveals new and important aspects of Wanhal's elusive character.

Another occasional work, albeit one of greater weight and significance, was the focus of Halvor Hosar's fascinating ‘Imperial Hermeneutics in Wanhal's Trauergesang’. It is not known whether Wanhal was commissioned to compose this remarkable cantata for voice and fortepiano or whether he did so as an admirer of Joseph II. Elements of the libretto suggest that Wanhal may have had some involvement in its creation. Hosar argued that its reference to Joseph's emancipation of the serfs, a policy that was bitterly opposed by the Bohemian nobility, held particular significance to Wanhal, who was born a bonded servant and purchased his freedom in the 1760s. Analysing the imagery in the engraving Joseph des Zweyten Sterbstunde, issued in Vienna by Artaria in 1790, and the tonal structure of the Trauergesang, Hosar proposed that Wanhal's choice of keys was intended to reflect the imagery of the text and its associated ideas. The work opens with the death of Joseph and ends with accession of Leopold II, the music moving from flat keys to sharp keys with the Trinitarian tonalities of E flat major and A major appearing at appropriate places. At the conclusion of the piece, the text expresses the hope that Leopold will continue the noble work of his illustrious predecessor. This was to prove a forlorn hope, for the emancipation of the serfs – for Wanhal, a matter of deep personal importance and perhaps one of the reasons he may have composed this work – was reversed the day after the Trauergesang was published.

Iwona Anna Granacka (Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań) made an important contribution to the current understanding of the dissemination of Wanhal's works in Poland in ‘The Works of Johann Baptist Wanhal in Polish Archives: Characteristics and Significance of the Collections’. While there are not many Wanhal works in Poland, they are distributed over a surprisingly wide area, with the majority preserved in church archives. The few instrumental works are preserved in Wrocław (Breslau); the remaining compositions are all sacred vocal works, including settings of liturgical and non-liturgical texts. Although Alexander Weinmann included a number of Polish sources in his Themen-Verzeichnis der Kompositionen von Johann Baptiste Wanhal (Vienna: Krenn, 1988), many of the details recorded in his notes are incorrect, and it is doubtful that he examined the sources in person. Granacka's work promises to correct many of these errors and to clarify the status of a number of works with problematic attributions. One of the masses in Poland that was attributed to Wanhal has since proved to be the work of the splendidly named Hieronymus Mango.

Herbert Seifert's (Universität Wien) ‘Erdödy Quartette aus vier Jahrzehten von Pleyel, Haydn und anderen’ examined the significant position occupied by the Erdödy family in the history of the string quartet. Both Counts Ladislaus (1746–1786) and Joseph Erdödy (1754–1824) commissioned string quartets or had works dedicated to them by composers who benefitted from their patronage. The most historically important of these seventeen works are Pleyel's Op. 1 quartets (1783), dedicated to Count Ladislaus Erdödy, Pleyel's first and most important patron, and Haydn's Op. 76 quartets (1799), commissioned by Count Joseph Erdödy. Other composers who wrote quartets for Count Joseph Erdödy include Bernhard Romberg, Anton Wranitzky and Leopold von Blumenthal. Seifert drew attention to the size and importance of Count Ladislaus's collection of music and instruments, which was auctioned in Vienna after his death. In addition to string quartets, the extensive archive included a large number of symphonies and concertos. Count Joseph Erdödy's ‘quartet in service’ – Martin Schlesinger (1751–1818), violin (succeeded by Leopold von Blumenthal in 1818); Anton Mikus (1756–1819), violin; Johann Wrostrowsky, violin and viola; and Leopold Schwendtner, violoncello – has special significance as one of the earliest established string quartets.

The late withdrawal of Hartmut Krones (Universität Wien) and Dagmar Glüxam (Kunst Universität Graz), both of whom were to present papers directly relating to editorial matters, meant that Charris Efithimou (Kunst Universität Graz) used his paper ‘Über die Edition der Sinfonie B. 144’ to launch a wider discussion on editorial practices in the Gesamtausgabe.

While on this occasion Pleyel-Schmankerl were not served to the small but ravening clutch of musicologists attending the symposium, the IPG's reputation for hospitality remains undimmed. None of those present will forget the pleasure of sitting in the Pleyel family vineyard drinking Ruppersthaler Wein and exchanging ideas about new areas of research into the music of Pleyel and Wanhal.