Ignaz Fränzl

Ignaz (Franz Joseph) Fränzl (Mannheim, 1736 – Mannheim, 1811) was a German violinist and composer associated with the electoral Palatine court at Mannheim, one of the most influential musical centres in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. The son of the musician Ferdinand Rudolph Fränzl, he grew up under the influence of Johann Stamitz, the central figure of the Mannheim school.

In 1754 he joined the Palatine orchestra as a violinist. In time he became one of the best-paid instrumentalists in the court chapel, earning an annual salary of 500 florins at the age of twenty-three. In 1768 he was applauded at the Concert Spirituel in Paris, and the Mercure de France published enthusiastic praise of him. Mozart also praised his violin playing in a letter dated 22 November 1777. In 1773 he shared the joint directorship of the orchestra with Giovanni Battista Toeschi.

After the court moved to Munich in 1778, Fränzl was appointed musical director of the newly founded Nationaltheater in Mannheim. That same autumn he brought together the musicians who remained from the court orchestra, along with some amateurs, to establish the Akademie-Konzerte, which remain the centre of the city's musical life. For these concerts Mozart began a concerto for piano and violin, which he never completed. He is therefore credited with reorganising the city's musical life on a civic basis. During the theatre's period of greatest splendour, under Dalberg, his duties as director prevented him from maintaining his activity as a soloist and composer.

According to Lipowsky, he was one of the finest violinists of his day, and through his pupils, among them Friedrich Wilhelm Pixis, he influenced the style and technique of Rode and Kreutzer. Most of his output was published in Paris and London. He wrote a mass, around six symphonies, nine ballets, seven violin concertos, four string quartets, duets for two violins and six sonatas for two violins and cello. His surviving works belong to the style of the second generation of the Mannheim school, and they reveal a personal idiom, particularly in his preference for the relative minor in slow movements and in passages of modulation.