Max Derrickson

(Joseph) Maurice Ravel      (b Cibourne, Basses-Pyrénées, March 7, 1875; d Paris, December 28, 1937)

Boléro

Boléro was commissioned by the dancer and choreographer Ida Rubinstein, formerly associated with the Ballet Russe, for her own troupe’s 1927-28 ballet season.  Initially she wanted Ravel to orchestrate some Spanish piano pieces by Chabrier, but that project ran afoul of an intellectual property contract.  So, instead, Ravel, in a few short months,  came up with his own Spanish work which first was called “Fandango” but he soon changed the title to “Boléro.”  When describing his new creation, Ravel called it “orchestral tissue without music” and an “experimental piece . . . of . . . one long, gradual crescendo,” without “contrasts” or “invention” or the “slightest attempt at virtuosity.”  He even issued a statement before its premiere warning his listeners of these supposed flaws.  Despite its composer’s dire warning, Boléro has become one of the most beloved pieces of classical music ever written.  Indeed, it became so popular worldwide after its premiere in 1928 that Ravel found it to be his albatross.
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It’s understandable, however, for one of the 20^th Century’s greatest composers to be disappointed in the fact that, of all his nearly 60 masterpieces, the one work that he created with such relative ease should be the one by which the world knew him best.  (His contemporary, Saint-Saëns, felt the same about his own Carnival of the Animals.)  But Ravel’s Boléro was no musical throw-away: his work ethic would never have allowed him to write something falling short of his own view of perfection.  And it was an “experiment” in all of the compositional elements that Ravel pinned his career on.
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One of the reasons for Boléro’s belovedness in fact explains why Ravel likely heard his piece in Morocco in 1935.
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Still a viable and dynamic art form in the Northern Africa of Ravel’s time where Morocco was a Spanish and French “protectorate,” Ravel’s Boléro was most likely heard by folk artists in Marrakech who re-adapted this originally Arabic genre into their repertoire.  In a brilliant fusion of heritage and innovation,
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Boléro captures a simmering sexual intensity like no other piece in the Western repertoire.

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Boléro, then, is a study in music breaking free, and it does just that in the final, brief, and exhilarating key change, followed by the chaos-producing trombone glissandos at the close of the piece, all ending in a tumultuous release.  And this exhilaration grows by way of a marvelous pageant of orchestral instruments – almost every instrument in the orchestra plays one of the melodies, creating layers of coloristic effects that pile up on one another excitingly while the volume grows incrementally, incessantly.

Ravel ended his “warning” that he wrote for the premiere by saying “. . . I have carried out exactly what I intended, and it is for listeners to take it or leave it.”  Audiences ever since have taken it indeed.