Paul Verlaine wrote a set of poems entitled Fêtes galantes (1869) which were set to music by Claude Debussy for high voice and piano. The composer Gabriel Fauré later paid a graceful musical homage to the fêtes galantes in his composition Masques et Bergamasques. Other French painters who depicted fêtes galantes included Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. The term "fête galante" comes from the title of this eponymous 1717 painting by Antoine Watteau. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the aristocrats of the French court abandoned the grandeur of Versailles for the more intimate townhouses of Paris where, elegantly attired, they could play and flirt and put on scenes from the Italian commedia dell'arte. Fête Galante is a French term referring to some of the celebrated pursuits of the idle, rich aristocrats in the 18th century - from 1715 until the 1770's.
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