Boléro

Boléro began as a different job altogether. The dancer Ida Rubinstein asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate six piano pieces from Isaac Albéniz's Iberia, but partway through he learned that the Spanish conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós had already done so and held the rights. Arbós offered to waive them. Ravel instead decided to write something entirely new, built on the Spanish bolero dance. On holiday at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he went to the piano and picked out a melody with one finger for his friend Gustave Samazeuilh, asking whether it did not have an insistent quality. His plan, he said, was to repeat it again and again without development, simply adding more of the orchestra each time. That is exactly what Boléro does: a snare-drum rhythm repeated 169 times beneath two alternating melodies, passed from flute to clarinet to saxophone and onward, growing from a whisper to a full-orchestra roar. Ravel imagined it staged in the open air with a factory behind, reflecting the music's mechanical nature. The premiere at the Paris Opéra in November 1928 was a sensation, much to the surprise of a composer who had predicted most orchestras would refuse to play it. A possibly apocryphal story has a woman shouting that Ravel was mad, and Ravel replying that she had understood the piece. He later clashed with Arturo Toscanini over his fast tempo, a public quarrel that only made the work more famous. It became his best-known composition and one of the last he completed before illness diminished his ability to write music.