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Maurice Ravel\u2019s Bol\u00e9ro<\/em> may be the composer\u2019s single most popular work. But there\u2019s a lot more to it than its two beguiling melodies may suggest. What makes Ravel’s Bol\u00e9ro<\/em> so unique, asks Tom Service<\/strong><\/p> There\u2019s nothing like Ravel<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Bole\u0301ro<\/em>: just two tunes, repeated throughout the orchestra, over and over again. It\u2019s a 15-minute piece \u2018without music in it\u2019, as Ravel himself said. There\u2019s no thematic development in Bole\u0301ro<\/em>, none of the conventional ways of making and sustaining a piece of orchestral music, even in the experimental decade of the 1920s.<\/p> In fact, Bole\u0301ro<\/em>\u2019s popularity on classical favourites playlists is one of the strangest things about it. It\u2019s made only of obsessive repetitions. One of the orchestra\u2019s two side-drummers has to play the same two-bar rhythm 170 times, turning into an orchestral automaton. <\/p> The only changes in the piece comes from how Ravel orchestrates the two tunes, the way he structures the piece as a single, gigantic crescendo<\/a><\/strong>, and the surprise modulation at its end. Ravel’s Bole\u0301ro<\/em> might be a warhorse. But it\u2019s the single most experimental piece of orchestral music in the classical-pops canon in the way its melodies and its rhythms hammer their way into your brain.<\/p> And yet Ravel’s Bole\u0301ro<\/em> does have precedents in the paradoxically opposed modes of expression that define it: the terpsichorean and the mechanical. The Ravel Bole\u0301ro<\/em> is a ballet, commissioned by Ida Rubinstein for her to dance in 1928. <\/p> A bolero is also a Spanish dance, but you don\u2019t just find boleros in folk traditions. Beethoven<\/a><\/strong> included two in his arrangements of Spanish tunes. And even if Ravel didn\u2019t know those, he could have heard dances with strikingly similar repeated, castanet-inspired rhythms everywhere from Berlioz<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Zai\u0308de<\/em> to Verdi<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Les ve\u0302pres siciliennes<\/em>. <\/p> But Ravel\u2019s Bole\u0301ro<\/em> is different from any of those sources. That’s because of how much slower it is than a true bolero. The Cuban composer Joaqui\u0301n Nin pointed that out to Ravel \u2013 who replied, \u2018That is of no interest whatsoever\u2019. That\u2019s because Bole\u0301ro<\/em> \u2013 ironically, now the most famous bolero anywhere \u2013 is really an abstracted version of the dance. In it, the sensuality of the original is hammered out, obsessed over and pummelled into a machine-like oblivion.<\/p>Why is Ravel’s Bol\u00e9ro<\/em> so special?<\/h2>
What inspired Ravel to write Bol\u00e9ro<\/em>?<\/h2>