Bolero

• In 1928, Ida Rubinstein commissioned Ravel to write a ballet with a Spanish musical flavor. He originally wanted to orchestrate Albéniz’s Iberia for this purpose, but as it so happened, Enrique Arbós already owned the rights to it. Ravel composed Bolero instead.¹

Inside a tavern in Spain, people dance beneath the brass lamp hung from the ceiling. [In response] to the cheers to join in, the female dancer has leapt onto the long table and her steps become more and more animated.

Scenario for the ballet Bolero, by Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein²

• Ravel said that he would have liked the set for Bolero to feature a factory.³

“In my childhood, I was very much interested in mechanisms…I visited factories often, as a small boy with my father. It was these machines, their clicking and roaring, which, with the Spanish folk songs sung to me at night-time as a berceuse by my mother, formed my first instruction in music!” 

Maurice Ravel, on his personal connection with factories and Spanish music.⁴ Ravel’s mother was Basque.⁵

And now, some Self-Deprecating Ravel Quotes about Bolero⁶

“I have written only one masterpiece. That is Bolero. Unfortunately, there is no music in it.”

Maurice Ravel, to Arthur Honegger 

Bolero is “orchestral tissue without music…no contrast, and practically no invention.” 

Maurice Ravel

1. Barbara L. Kelly, “Ravel, (Joseph) Maurice,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed April 1, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000052145.
2. Deborah Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 227.
3. Douglas Lee, Douglas, Masterworks of 20th-Century Music: The Modern Repertory of the Symphony Orchestra (New York: Routledge, 2002), 329.
4. Quoted in Deborah Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59.
5. Barbara L. Kelly, “Ravel, (Joseph) Maurice,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed April 1, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000052145.
6. Julian Johnson, After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 222.