Pleyel et Cie ("Pleyel and Company") is a French piano manufacturing firm founded by the composer Ignace Pleyel in 1807. In 1815, he was joined by his son, Camille, as a business partner. The firm provided pianos to Frédéric Chopin, and also ran a concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, where Chopin performed his first — and last — Paris concerts. Pleyel's major contribution to piano development was the first use of a metal frame in a piano. 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.



History
Pleyel pioneered the player piano with the Pleyela line of pianos. These were often very small pianos of a very unusual design.
Pleyel was the first to introduce the upright piano to France, adapting the best features of pianos built in Britain. 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 company's success led them to invest in experiments, resulting in the Double Piano in 1890. 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.
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.
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.



Today
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 Gaveau piano companies which also manufactured pianos in France. 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 in order 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 where they began introducing new pianos designed by famous designers.
The red spruce used by Pleyel and several other top manufacturers comes from the Fiemme Valley in Trentino, 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."