The composer indicated by Revuz for the music for this dance is E. Etesse, whose piano piece “Menuet Louis XV” was published by Lipperheide of Berlin in December 1885 within an issue of the Illustrierte Frauenzeitung (Illustrated Ladies’ Journal). Many similar minuets aimed at amateur performers were composed in the same period. But why did late nineteenth century composers compose minuets, why should they be as widely distributed as Etesse’s, and why should they still be in use thirty years after publication?

To understand what Etesse and Revuz imagined, one can look at near-contemporary treatises on dance history; one Francophone example is ethnographer and painter Gaston Vuillier’s “History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages to our own times“, published in 1897 and in English translation in the US in 1898.

For Vuillier, the minuet was the “special dance of Louis XV”; he describes its revival along with other Old Court dances and contrasts this revival with a waning of interest in the Quadrille. The old dances, he says, bring with them “traditions of the grace and elegance of the last century” (the eighteenth). In the 1880s, the minuets of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven “were heard again”, and Léon Guyot’s orchestra played minuets and cotillons in the great houses. “At the Comtesse de Montbazon’s, ladies in hoops and paniers danced the Minuet under an immense triumphal arch of flowers”. At the Comtesse de Courval’s, on the other hand, the dancers dressed as Watteau shepherdesses. Where the aristocracy set the trends, the bourgeoisie followed.