This Day in Classical Music History (Ravel's "Bolero" Premieres)

November 22, 1928—Dancer Ida Rubinstein premiered a ballet written for her by Maurice Ravel, which she performed on a table on the stage of the Paris Opera rather than in the simulated factory setting he preferred. But with time, classical music listeners embraced Bolero wholeheartedly—not to mention aficionados of Bo Derek years later, in the movie 10.

Rubinstein’s interpretation of the material mirrored the one that Blake Edwards took in directing Ms. Derek in the film whose title became a synonym for the ultimate in feminine beauty: it was all about the riveted gaze of the lust-stricken male. Rubinstein’s dancing brought the ballet’s males mad with desire; in the 1979 Edwards movie, Dudley Moore cannot move fast enough when he learns that the young woman who enraptures him finds the Ravel work indispensable for lovemaking.

Oddly enough, the industrial setting that Ravel had wanted for what turned out to be his most famous work resonated with his general approach to musical craftsmanship. Igor Stravinsky put it memorably when he called Ravel “a Swiss clockmaker.” Everything in the piece had to contribute to the impact of the whole—an idea Ravel had taken to heart ever since he’d read it in one of his major cultural influences, Edgar Allan Poe.

If there was any country the composer preferred to France, it wasn’t Switzerland, however, but Spain. He continually pointed to Spanish and Basque ancestors on his mother’s side of the family, though some musicologists question the authenticity of this claim.

The very title of this composition associated indelibly with sensuality certainly invokes Spanish elements. But let’s take a closer look at the term “bolero.” You’ve seen or heard one of these dances, right? What do you remember about it? It’s lively, right? With plenty of castanets and singing, correct?

Now listen to the Ravel piece again. Hear any castanets? Singing? And for several minutes after it starts, would you describe it as lively? Didn’t think so.

There’s only one conclusion you can draw, faithful reader: Ravel’s Bolero bears as much relation to the Spanish dance as the Coen brothers’ film Fargo does to the North Dakota town (or even, for that matter, to country-music songstress Donna Fargo).

Having lost, at least temporarily, the fight over the setting for his piece, Ravel was not about to yield in a struggle over the music itself, even if he called it, with tongue in cheek, “a masterpiece…without a note of music in it.”

A year after the Paris Opera performance, Arturo Toscanini introduced to Americans at the New York Philharmonic the “17-minute crescendo” by the Frenchman-who-wanted-to-be-Spanish. None too pleased by the way the maestro rushed his musicians through their paces, even through the explosive finale with its booming brass, Ravel let the conductor know in no uncertain terms that he was out of line.

Though Bolero is famously slow--repeating its two parts nine times, with only the most subtle shifts in orchestration tightening and driving the effect—Ravel completed it as the result of a fast but necessary improvisation. He had to ditch his original plan—Fandango, the orchestration of some pieces from Iberia—when he discovered that the rights to the material had already been assigned to someone else.

Not a great way to start his four-month tour of America in 1928. But while on vacation on Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Ravel was inspired with another Spanish theme. The result, of course, is now a staple of the classical-music repertory, not to mention an unforgettable element of film music.