An almost physiological march, conceived in the midst of feverish delirium. Think of the Bolero as that enigmatic character who arrives at a party and simply repeats a single sentence for hours on end. And to the astonishment of the audience, no one can—or wants to—look away. A single idea, a unique litany delivered with the obstinacy of a high-born neurotic, whose orchestral garb evolves like a salon scandal revealed in increasingly audible whispers.
Commissioned by Ida Rubinstein for a ballet—believe it or not, the Russian woman wanted to dance to it—the piece progresses like a courtship: calculated, inexorable, almost abstract. It all begins with the ostinato of a drum that seems to warn: “This is the premise. There will be no other. And I assure you that you will not miss it.” Then the woodwinds, strings, and brass join in, all infected by the same stylized monomania. Here we find no thematic developments, no fugues, no artificial variations. Only a meticulous crescendo of volume, texture, and tension. The chronicle of an outburst without catharsis, as if the climax were canceled for strictly aesthetic reasons.
And that was precisely Ravel’s intention. In his own words, the Bolero is an exercise “without music,” a pure orchestral mechanism. Translation: I am seducing you with deliberately vacuous architecture, and you, dear listener, will end up cheering it on your feet. An experiment so insolently successful that it has ended up setting everything from ice skating pirouettes to epiphanies of dubious taste in perfume commercials to music.
Of course, the dénouement is explosive. An abrupt modulation, almost a harmonic assault, as if the master of ceremonies had pressed a panic button in the middle of the collective trance. At the end, the audience is left suspended in that uncomfortable dilemma between ovation and the need for a cigarette. The Bolero is proof that insistence, when it becomes methodical, can be confused with hypnosis; that desire, to be universal, requires a relentless scaffolding; and that a single idea dressed in the appropriate luxury can subjugate the masses—or, at the very least, leave them on the brink of an exquisitely orchestrated collapse.
On one occasion, a lady approached him excitedly to congratulate him on the beauty of the work and confessed between sighs: “Maestro, how wonderful your Bolero is! … I imagined a whole romance while listening to it.” “Madame, you are mistaken. It is a piece for orchestra without music,” replied the composer with the courtesy of the indifferent.
Uninterested in explanations, Ravel came to hate the sudden fame of Bolero with the same intensity with which he defended it as an experiment. When a conductor performed it at a faster tempo than indicated, Ravel said it was a premature caricature of his own funeral. Although enjoyable, Bolero leaves the listener with no choice but to endure it.An obsessive and repetitive orchestral piece, conceived as a pure mechanism without thematic developments, it builds tension through an inexorable crescendo until a hypnotic and aesthetic collapse.
Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Several Circles, 1926. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
