Boléro

Program notes

About the Work

Boléro is the most famous thing Maurice Ravel ever wrote, and the work he liked least to be remembered by. He composed it in 1928 not as a concert piece but as a ballet, on a commission from the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who wanted a Spanish-flavoured number for her company. Ravel, ever the meticulous craftsman, set himself a deliberately austere problem: to write a piece consisting of one idea, repeated without variation, sustained for a quarter of an hour by orchestration and a single, unbroken crescendo. He described it, with characteristic dryness, as ‘orchestral tissue without music’, an experiment in pure sound and colour rather than thematic development. To his own surprise, and somewhat to his irritation, it became the runaway popular hit of his career, played far more often than the subtler works he prized.

The structure could hardly be simpler. A single rhythmic pattern, laid down at the start by the snare drum, runs unchanged from the first bar to the last, repeated, by the end, several hundred times. Over it, two related melodic phrases (one major-ish, one with a Spanish, Moorish inflection) alternate, also without variation, passed from instrument to instrument. The harmony stays anchored, almost obsessively, on a single chord of C major. Nothing ‘happens’ in the conventional sense: there is no development, no contrast, no second subject. Everything that changes is a matter of colour and of volume: the music grows louder and more thickly scored by infinitesimal degrees, drawing in more and more of the orchestra until the whole ensemble is blazing.

This is why Boléro is, despite Ravel’s disclaimers, a supreme feat of orchestration and of nerve. The fascination lies entirely in the slow accumulation: in the way a solo flute at the opening becomes, fifteen minutes later, the full weight of the orchestra; in the daring solo turns Ravel hands to instruments rarely given the limelight (a soprano saxophone, a high E-flat clarinet); and in the extraordinary discipline required of conductor and players to hold the tempo dead steady and ration the crescendo so that there is somewhere left to go. After the relentless build, Ravel permits himself a single, electrifying coup: in the very last bars the music suddenly wrenches sideways into a foreign key (the only harmonic event in the entire piece) before crashing to its close. On a programme devoted to the colours of the orchestra, Boléro is the ultimate demonstration: an entire work conjured from rhythm, repetition, and the art of orchestration alone.

What to Listen For

Listen first for the snare drum. From the very opening it taps out the rhythmic pattern that will continue, utterly unchanged, for the whole piece, quiet at first, almost subliminal, and inexorably more present as the music grows. It is the spine of the entire work; once you hear it, you will never lose it.

Over that rhythm, follow the melody as it is handed from instrument to instrument. It begins on a solo flute, low and soft, then passes to clarinet, bassoon, and onward through the orchestra, including unusual soloists like the soprano saxophone and the high, piercing E-flat clarinet. The tune never changes; what changes is who plays it, and in what combination. Notice how Ravel adds instruments in ever-richer layers, doubling the melody in startling colours.

The single great event is the crescendo. Resist the urge to wait for a ‘theme’ to develop; there isn’t one. Instead, attend to the slow, almost imperceptible swell from near-silence to overwhelming force, and to the discipline with which the conductor holds the tempo steady so the build never lurches. Then, in the final bars, comes the one surprise Ravel allows himself: the music lurches abruptly into a new key, a sudden harmonic swerve after fifteen minutes of unwavering C major, before three hammered chords bring the whole hypnotic machine crashing to its end.