Ask for an example of a minuet out of the blue, and you’re likely to be referred to the slower one by Boccherini, or the more brisk one by Mozart in Eine kleine Nachtmusik, or even the little one in G major in Bach’s Anna Magdalena Notebook. When I was in a performance of a French play in the twelfth grade, Les précieuses ridicules by Molière, I even learned, with three others, to dance the minuet; my instructor at the time was Susan Sindall of The Juilliard School, who later married Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach), but I can’t remember any of the steps today.
The minuet-and-trio form constitutes more than the obligatory third movement of classical string quartets and symphonies. Among other mandates, it includes some of the earliest music we ever learn at the piano. Here, for instance, is something we all probably heard in kindergarten, a Minuet in F major, K. 2, by the six-year-old Mozart (I’m copying this from my ancient Köchel catalogue, a 1947 Edwards reprint from a wartime seizure):
Another familiar item, from a beginner’s John Thompson piano anthology, you may still have in your piano bench:
This appears in Kinsky’s catalogue as WoO 10, no. 2, originally for orchestra (1795), and published the next year in the composer’s piano reduction. The twenty-five-year-old Beethoven probably would at that time have been preoccupied with composing big pieces like the Opus 5 Cello Sonatas or the Opus 7 Piano Sonata, so my guess is that he likely forgot about this minuet and others of WoO 10 as soon as he had been paid for them (not very much). One hundred and forty years later, this same minuet was gracefully reborn in one of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies. Beethoven’s royalties from this one run-through, had he been on hand to demand them, could have amounted to as much as he ever earned in his lifetime.
Nor is Chopin in any way a forgotten composer, but his Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 4, is almost never performed or heard anywhere; it contains his only known minuet, with an elegant beginning, youthful but certainly characteristic.
Giovanni Bolzoni (1841-1919), director of the Turin Conservatory, is occasionally noted as a composer who gave early encouragement to the young Edgard Varèse, and for just one composition, an arrangement for string orchestra from one of his quartets. This minuet was a pops-orchestral favorite until about 1960, in several versions and even under different titles; I remember hearing it announced as “Passionata” on the radio, and it’s still good. (This version is in the string-seldom key of B major; I have another one for piano, in C.)
Enrico Toselli (1883-1926) is forgotten almost everywhere, though not in Germany, where in 1907 he eloped with the Archduchess Louise of Saxony, thirteen years older and already the mother of seven children; their marriage lasted five years, scandalizing the Saxon court and perhaps other Hapsburg royalty. But Toselli’s minuet, called “Serenata,” lives on merrily today; you will remember it as the theme music for the 1950s television series “The Goldbergs,” starring Gertrude Berg.
