Maurice Ravel, 1925. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Paris, Opéra, 22 November 1928. The new ballet commissioned from Maurice Ravel by the dancer Ida Rubinstein goes on stage: barely a quarter of an hour of music built on an idea that smacks of a laboratory experiment. Two themes, repeated eighteen times without development, over a drum rhythm that never changes, the only variable being the orchestration and a continuous crescendo from pianissimo to roar, up to a modulation, a single one, a step away from the end. At the premiere, tradition has it, a woman cried out that he was mad; Ravel remarked that she, at least, had understood the piece.
Boléro became within a few years the most performed orchestral music on the planet, and its author spent the rest of his life explaining, with his dry irony, that it was a misunderstanding. His statements are documented and consistent: an experiment in orchestration, seventeen minutes of orchestra without music, a masterpiece, unfortunately empty of music, as reported by the critic Calvocoressi, who knew him well. It was not false modesty: it was the exact diagnosis of a goldsmith who had built, as a deadly serious game, a machine of obsession, and who watched the public mistake the machine for a sensual confession. Ravel, the most reserved man in French music, found himself the author of the piece most used by cinema for seduction scenes: the irony of history makes no allowances.
Then there is the chapter that today reads with a different shiver. In the years after Boléro, Ravel began to lose his words: the neurological illness that would kill him in 1937, never diagnosed with certainty and still debated by clinicians, progressively took from him the ability to write down and transcribe the music that, he said, he continued to hear whole in his head. Some neurologists have hypothesised, in retrospect, that the obsessiveness of Boléro already bore traces of the disorder: it is an unprovable suggestion, and must be handled as such, but it adds to the piece a shadow that the audience of 1928 could not hear. The last great work, the Concerto for the Left Hand, written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, maimed in the war, is the farewell of a supreme craftsman who built perfection while his inner instrument was going dark.
What remains is the question Boléro puts to anyone who writes music: can an exercise in pure technique become a mass emotional experience? The public’s answer, for a century, has been yes, and perhaps the public was right: Ravel’s machine is empty the way a drum is empty, which is precisely why it resounds. He would not agree. But that is the fate of perfect goldsmiths: to make objects bigger than their intentions, and to spend their lives protesting with elegance.