Maurice Ravel once described Boléro as “seventeen minutes of orchestral tissue without music.” Somewhat to the composer’s surprise, Boléro eclipsed most of his other works in popularity. Ravel himself considered it “an experiment in a very special and limited direction [that] should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve.” 

What it does achieve, then, is a single drawn-out crescendo in which the instruments of the orchestra enter gradually to build up the closing climax. The melody, which is quite complex, with many irregularities in its phrase structure, never changes. More precisely, it alternates between two forms. Generally, we hear the first version twice, followed by two renditions of the second version, and then the first form again. The snare drums play the bolero rhythm without a moment’s interruption from beginning to end. The bass part is not exceedingly varied either: it consists of the same two notes, for all but eight measures of the piece. 

Over this clockwork ostinato, the wandering melody snakes its way through the orchestra, starting with solo flute, then clarinet, followed by the bassoon, up through the high-pitched E-flat clarinet, before descending to the oboe d’amore (a double reed pitched between an oboe and English horn). More instruments take their turns: trumpet with flute, saxophones, twinkling celesta and horn, a quartet of reeds, an inebriated-sounding trombone sliding from note to note, the highest-pitched woodwinds, and finally, the strings. The texture continues to build, now with whole swaths of the orchestra jumping in until, almost unexpectedly, the piece tumbles to an end. 

Boléro was first conceived as a ballet for Ida Rubinstein’s dance company in Paris. (Interestingly, the original title was Fandango, another Spanish dance, which has a slower tempo; Ravel always insisted that the tempo of his piece should not be rushed.) The original ballet’s storyline, if it may be called that, has been summarized by one writer as follows: 

The curtain rises on a dark, smoky room in a Spanish tavern. A woman enters, dressed as a gypsy, with a tall Spanish comb and a scarlet and black shawl. Atop a table, she begins to stamp out the rhythm of the bolero. Instantly the room fills with men. The music grows in passion and the woman is joined in the dance, first by one and then by a dozen or so men. The excitement increases. Knives are drawn. A fight is barely avoided. The gypsy woman is tossed from arm to arm. Then, suddenly, all comes to a stop as the music reaches its climax. Curtain. 

Boléro was a sensation at its premiere in Paris in 1928 — the music overshadowing the choreography — and the piece quickly took on a life of its own in the concert hall. This independent success may have been due, in part, to the fact that the ballet’s scenario was not the only thing on Ravel’s mind when he composed the piece. In a 1932 interview printed by the London Evening Standard, Ravel said, “I love going over [to] factories and seeing vast machinery at work. It is awe-inspiring and great. It was a factory which inspired my Boléro. I would like it always to be played with a vast factory in the background.” The same idea had appeared in Ravel’s correspondence with musicologist and friend Alexis Roland-Manuel four years earlier, who had detected rhythmic similarities between Boléro and the “Fabrika” (Factory) movement in Prokofiev’s ballet Le pas d’acier (The Steel Leap), which was produced by the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1927, the year before Boléro. 

Whether you envision Spanish dancers in a smoky room, or the awe-inspiring synchronization of factory automation, Ravel’s Boléro strikes a mesmerizing balance between stasis and momentum, as sure to entrance audiences today as it did almost a century ago. 

— adapted from a program note by Peter Laki