The Belle Époque (French for "Beautiful Era") was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I.
The arts underwent a radical transformation during the decades before World War I, and new artistic forms associated with cultural modernity emerged.
Impressionism, which had been considered the artistic avant-garde in the 1860s, gained widespread acceptance. In the early 20th century, Expressionism became the new avant-garde. The visual art style known as Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in central Europe), characterized by its curvilinear forms, become prominent and dominated design throughout much of Europe. Many successful examples of this style, with notable regional variations, were built in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Austria (the Vienna Secession), Hungary, Bohemia and Latvia. It soon spread around the world, including to Mexico and the United States. It is sometimes called "Belle Époque style".
Theatre adopted new modern methods, including Expressionism, and many playwrights wrote plays that shocked contemporary audiences either with their frank depictions of everyday life and sexuality or with unusual artistic elements. Cabaret theater also become popular. Musically, the Belle Époque was characterized by salon music. This was not considered "serious" music but, rather, short pieces considered accessible to a general audience. In addition to works for piano solo or violin and piano, the Belle Époque was famous for its large repertory of songs (mélodies, romanze, etc.). The Italians were the greatest proponents of this type of song, its greatest champion being Francesco Paolo Tosti. Though Tosti's songs never completely left the repertoire, salon music generally fell into a period of obscurity. Even as encores, singers were afraid to sing them at "serious" recitals. In that period, waltzes also flourished. Operettas were also at the peak of their popularity, with composers such as Johann Strauss III, Emmerich Kalman, and Franz Lehár. It was during this era that the motion pictures were developed, though these did not become common until after World War I.
European literature underwent a major transformation during the Belle Époque. Literary realism and naturalism achieved new heights. Among the most famous realist or naturalist authors are Benito Pérez Galdós, Theodor Fontane, Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola. Realism gradually developed into modernism, which emerged in the 1890s and came to dominate European literature during the Belle Époque's final years and throughout the interwar years. Among the most prominent European modernist authors are Andrei Bely, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Walser and William Butler Yeats. .
