What is a Minuet ?
A minuet is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, possibly from the French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular group dances called branle à mener or amener. The term also describes the musical form that accompanies the dance, which subsequently developed more fully, often with a longer musical form called the minuet and trio, and was much used as a movement in the early classical symphony.
Minuets were introduced—to opera at first—by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who included no fewer than 92 of them in his theatrical works and in the late 17th century the minuet was adopted into the suite, such as some of the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Händel. Around Lully's time it became a common practice to score this middle section for a trio (such as two oboes and a bassoon, as is common in Lully’s music). As a result, this middle section came to be called the minuet's trio, even when no trace of such an orchestration remains. The overall structure is called rounded binary or minuet form. After these developments by Lully, composers occasionally inserted a modified repetition of the first (A) section or a section that contrasted with both the A section and what was thereby rendered the third or C section, yielding the form A–A′–B–A or A–B–C–A, respectively; an example of the latter is the third movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, popularly known under the title Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
A livelier form of the minuet simultaneously developed into the scherzo (which was generally also coupled with a trio). This term came into existence approximately from Beethoven onwards, but the form itself can be traced back to Haydn. The minuet and trio eventually became the standard third movement in the four-movement classical symphony, Johann Stamitz being the first to employ it with regularity. 😌
