Rhythm and form The name of this dance is also given to a musical composition written in the same time and
rhythm, though when not accompanying an actual dance the pace was quicker. Stylistically refined minuets, apart from the social dance context, 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 Handel. Among Italian and some French composers the minuet was often considerably quicker and livelier and was sometimes written in or time Because the tempo of a minuet was not standard, the tempo direction
tempo di minuetto was ambiguous unless qualified by another direction, as it sometimes was. Initially, before its adoption in contexts other than social dance, the minuet was usually in
binary form, with two repeated sections of usually eight
bars each. But the second section eventually expanded, resulting in a kind of
ternary form. The second (or middle) minuet provided a form of contrast by means of different key (although in many works, the second minuet stayed in the same key as the first minuet), orchestration, and thematic material. On a larger scale, two such minuets might be further combined, so that the first minuet was followed by a second one and then by a repetition of the first. The whole form might in any case be repeated as long as the dance lasted.
Minuet and trio Around the time of
Jean-Baptiste Lully, 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). 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 thus with regularity. An example of the true form of the minuet is to be found in
Don Giovanni. A famous example of a more recent instrumental work in minuet form is
Ignacy Jan Paderewski's
Minuet in G. == See also ==