Boléro

Ravel’s Boléro, one of the most popular pieces written in the twentieth century, happened almost by accident. Had events gone to plan, the composer would have spent his summer holiday in 1928 orchestrating six piano pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia for a short ballet with a Spanish setting that Ida Rubinstein was to perform at the Paris Opera in November. It was when he was on his way south to the Atlantic coast at St-Jean-de-Luz, near where he was born in the French Basque country, that he discovered that a Spanish composer was already at work on orchestrating Iberia for another ballet and that he had exclusive rights on it.

Ravel’s first reaction was to panic. He couldn’t let Ida Rubinstein down but nor could he create a whole new score in the three or four months still available. Then he had this great idea. “Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?” he asked a friend while playing it for him with one finger on the piano. “I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.” It wasn’t as simple as that of course. There are actually two themes rather than one and what he repeats is not a just a phrase but a whole paragraph. To take the opening paragraph as the model: a side drum starts up the rhythm which will persist throughout; a flute introduces the first theme and a clarinet repeats it; then a bassoon introduces the syncopated second theme and an E-flat clarinet repeats it.

The whole episode is now presented four times over, always with a different orchestration and with gradually more and more colour added, sometimes in different harmonies but always, until the climactic moment fourteen bars before the end, in the same key. The one change of key, which has a briefly explosive effect, is masterfully presented as the release of the tension accumulated by repetition, by the gradual increase in volume and, above all, by the untamable Andalusian spirit of the syncopated melody which finally escapes the mechanical control so far imposed on it.

“I’ve written only one masterpiece,” Ravel once told Honegger, “and that’s Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”

Ravel’s Boléro, one of the most popular pieces written this century, happened almost by accident. Had events gone to plan, he would have spent his summer holiday in 1928 orchestrating six piano pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia for a short ballet with a Spanish setting that Ida Rubinstein was to perform at the Paris Opera in November. It was when he was on his way south to the Atlantic coast at St-Jean-de-Luz, near where he was born in the Basque country, that he discovered that a Spanish composer was already at work on orchestrating Iberia for another ballet and that he had exclusive rights on it.

Ravel’s first reaction was to panic. He couldn’t let Ida Rubinstein down but nor could he create a whole new score in the three or four months still available. Then he had this great idea. “Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?” he asked a friend while playing it for him with one finger on the piano. “I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.” It wasn’t as simple as that of course. There are actually two themes rather than one and what he repeats is not a just a phrase but a whole paragraph. To take the opening paragraph as the model: a side drum starts up the rhythm which will persist throughout, a flute introduces the first theme in C major, a clarinet repeats it in the same key and then a bassoon introduces the syncopated second theme and an E-flat clarinet repeats it.

The whole episode is now repeated four times, always with a different orchestration and with gradually more and more colour added, sometimes in different harmonies but always, until the climactic moment fourteen bars before the end, in the same key. The modulation, which erupts into E major and then falls straight back into C, is masterfully presented as the release of the tension accumulated by repetition, by the gradual increase in volume and, above all, by the untamable Andalusian spirit of the syncopated melody which finally escapes the mechanical control so far imposed on it.

“I’ve written only one masterpiece,” Ravel once told Honegger, “and that’s Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.” Had he foreseen exactly how much music is to be found in the scores of the minimalist composers of today he might not have been so hard on himself.

Gerald Larner©

Ravel, who had a technique equalled by few of his contemporaries, thrived on problems. In the summer of 1928, however, when he was looking forward to a holiday near where he was born in the French Basque country, he met a problem even he feared he couldn’t solve. All he had to do, apart from swimming in the sea, he thought, was orchestrate a selection of pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia for a flamenco ballet to be performed in Paris in November. Since he enjoyed orchestration, as well as being exceptionally good at it, he felt that arranging a few piano pieces by a Spanish composer he greatly admired would scarcely spoil his holiday. But then, on his way south with a Spanish colleague who was driving him to St-Jean-de-Luz, he found to his dismay that the right to make arrangements of Albéniz’s music had been granted exclusively to another composer and there was nothing he could do about it.

Ravel’s first reaction was to panic. He couldn’t let down the dancer who had commissioned the score but nor could he create from scratch even a short ballet in the three or four months still available. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. The emergency inspired him to draw on his most fundamental resources, on the aptitude for engineering he had inherited from his Swiss father and the love of Spanish music imbued in him by his Basque mother. The piece he was to write, well in time for the ballet performance, derives its excitement from the tension between mechanical repetition on the one hand and authentic Spanish melody on the other. While it amounts in time-sheet terms to little more than orchestration, in terms of invention it is an extravagantly daring and original piece.

A friend, who happened to visit Ravel not long after the inspiration for Boléro had hit him, remembered seeing him dressed for the beach and picking out a tune with one finger on the piano. “Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?” the composer asked him. “I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.” It wasn’t as simple as that of course. There are actually two themes rather than one and what he repeats is not a just a phrase but a whole paragraph. To take the opening paragraph as the model: a side drum starts up the rhythm which will persist throughout; a flute introduces the first theme and a clarinet repeats it; then a bassoon introduces the syncopated second theme and a clarinet repeats it. The whole episode is now repeated four times, always with a different orchestration and with gradually more and more colour added, sometimes in different harmonies but always, until the explosively climactic moment fourteen bars before the end, in the same key.

“I’ve written only one masterpiece,” Ravel once told Honegger, “and that’s Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”

Gerald Larner ©2004

The basic idea of Ravel’s Boléro - the same melodic material repeated over and over again to an unchanging rhythmic accompaniment - is so extraordinary that it has inspired all kinds of theories as to how he ever came to think of it. From the woman who cried out “He’s mad!” at the first performance in 1928 to the psychiatrist who more recently identified in it the obsessive symptoms of senile dementia, commentators have been tempted to question even the composer’s sanity. While it is true that Ravel did suffer from a form of dementia in his last years, the fact is that the symptoms of his illness had no serious effect on him until 1932. Besides, after Boléro, he was still to write two of his greatest works, the Piano Concertos in D and G, neither of them particularly obsessive.

There is no saner piece of music than Boléro. Like so many great inventions, it was born of necessity: having promised Ida Rubinstein that he would orchestrate six of the piano pieces in Albéniz’s Iberia for a ballet which would feature her in a Spanish setting, and having put off work on it until it was almost too late, he was disturbed to discover that Enrique Arbós was already engaged on orchestrating Iberia for another ballet. Worse still, Arbós had exclusive rights in it. Ravel’s first reaction was to panic. He couldn’t let Ida Rubinstein down but nor could he create a whole new score in the three or four months still available. Then he had this great idea. “Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?” he asked a friend while playing it for him with one finger on the piano. “I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.”

It wasn’t as simple as that of course. “Given the idea of using only one theme,” Ravel once said, “any Conservatoire student could have done as well.” But Ravel, a master of orchestration, was no student. There are actually two themes rather than one and what he repeats is not a just a phrase but a whole paragraph. To take the opening paragraph as the model: the side drum starts up the rhythm which will persist throughout, a flute introduces the first theme in C major, a clarinet repeats it in the same key and then a bassoon introduces the syncopated second theme in a wayward sort of C minor and an E-flat clarinet repeats it.

The whole episode is now repeated four times, always with a different orchestration and with gradually more and more colour added, sometimes in different harmonies but always, until the climactic moment fourteen bars before the end, in the same key. The modulation, which erupts into E major and then falls straight back into C, is masterfully presented as the release of the tension accumulated by repetition, by the gradual increase in volume and, above all, by the untamable Andalusian spirit of the syncopated melody which finally escapes the mechanical control so far imposed on it.

“I’ve written only one masterpiece,” Ravel once told Arthur Honegger, “and that’s Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.” Had he foreseen exactly how much music is to be found in the scores of the minimalist composers of today he might not have been so hard on himself.