Everyone knows the music of Bolero. It is very difficult to find anyone, even those who dislike classical music, that haven’t heard it played somewhere. One of the most popular tunes in history, Bolero cemented its place in pop culture with the movie 10 and the iconic Ice Dance routine which won Torvill and Dean their own place in history as well as Olympic Gold.  

But what about the man behind this phenomenon?  Upon studying the man himself, I’ve come to realize that he was much more than just a composer. Maurice Ravel was a meticulous craftsman, the fastidious creator of some of the most exquisite music ever composed. He believed that there was a perfect solution to every musical problem and that it was his responsibility to polish each new piece until it sparkled like a piece of iridescent jewellery. 

This attention to detail extended to all parameters of his life. He was always immaculately presented, wearing the latest snappy fashions topped off by a pair of black patent leather shoes that he couldn’t bear to be parted from. 

Ravel’’s dealings with people were invariably cordial and polite, yet he seems never to have become really intimate with anyone. He didn’t marry, and although his somewhat dandyish appearance and notoriously secret private life led some to speculate wildly about his sexual leanings, by his own admission Ravel found the whole idea of entering into impassioned relationships distasteful. 

Like anyone else, however, he had his emotional security blankets: he adored animals (particularly cats), children (as long as they weren’t his own), communing with nature and all things mechanical (especially toys). 

Stravinsky once referred to Ravel as “the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers”, and in a sense he was right. Yet the cool exterior and careful organisation of Ravel’s day-to-day existence was little more than a façade behind which lay a personality of extraordinary complexity and passion. Ravel declared himself “of the same type as the Romantics”, while emphasising that “one doesn’t need to open one’s chest to show that one has a heart”. 

And therein lies the paradox and the clue to Ravel’s musical indestructibility. If you choose to play it cool with a work like Boléro, its remorseless forward momentum is still mesmerizing. But if you really get under the music’s skin, revelling in its hints of decadent jazz and erotic Hispanic sensuality set against the mechanized onslaught of an orchestral army, the effect is devastating. Ravel – a cold, calculating, manipulator of sound? Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Ravel inherited an interest in all things mechanical from his father, Pierre, an engineer and inventor who was responsible for, among other things, a motorcar that turned somersaults. His mother, Marie, was of Basque origin, which was a contributing factor to the many Spanish-influenced pieces he produced in later life. From an early age it was music that fired his enthusiasm and at just 14 years old he won a place at the Paris Conservatoire. Although Ravel was neither academically very gifted nor a pianist of any great distinction, his dedication to composing was absolute. 

He left the Conservatoire in 1895 and devoted himself to writing music, producing, among others, the enchanting Menuet antique. Two years later, he returned to the Conservatoire and enrolled in composition lessons with Fauré, who was a sympathetic and encouraging teacher. But Ravel’s unorthodox style put him on a collision course with the Conservatoire’s notoriously conservative director, Théodore Dubois. 

Incredibly, year after year, the Conservatoire, with Dubois at the helm, refused to award Ravel its most prestigious composition prize, the Prix de Rome. By now the budding young composer had a considerable following in the wake of such early masterpieces as the heavenly Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte, Jeux d’eau (a glitteringly inventive piece for solo piano), the String Quartet and the ravishingly exotic song cycle, Shéhérazade. 

In 1905 he was in full flow, composing the inventive and seductive Sonatine and Miroirs (both for piano) and the Introduction et Allegro (one of the finest-ever works for the harp), among others. Again he entered the Prix de Rome, only to be eliminated in the first round with the stern warning from Dubois that “Ravel may look upon us as old fogies if he pleases, but he will not with impunity make fools of us.” 

But this time Dubois had gone too far. There was public outcry at what the newspapers were now calling the “Ravel Affair” and Dubois was forced to stand down, passing on the directorship to Fauré. The resulting publicity did Ravel no harm at all and he soon found himself moving in fashionable circles, widely recognized as both the natural successor to Debussy and France’s most celebrated young composer. Riding on a wave of popular success, Ravel began producing a series of remarkably varied scores that took the French musical world by storm. 

First up was the glittering orchestral Rapsodie Espagnole (1907-08). No one had ever heard anything quite like the opening ‘Prélude à la Nuit’, which simmers seductively in the evening air, a tantalising sequence of half-whispered confidences receding dreamily into the distance. Then there’s the ‘Malagueña’ followed by the sultry ‘Habañéra’, which emerges as if through a heat-haze, while the ‘Feria’ finale is all brilliant sunshine, an unquenchable orchestral celebration of the Hispanic world. 

Ravel then pushed Lisztian piano virtuosity to its furthest reaches in the demonic ‘Scarbo’, the final section of Gaspard de la Nuit (1908). Always on the look-out for new challenges, he re-engaged with the sensations and memories of childhood in Ma Mère l’oye (‘Mother Goose’), arguably the most perfect score by this most outwardly “perfect” of composrs. 

The hits continued with two more contrasting works: Daphnis et Chloé (1912), a voluptuously sensual ballet score, and the neo-classical poignant Piano Trio (1914). 

Just as Ravel was at the height of his powers, the First World War broke out; it caused him such distress that a number of planned projects never came to fruition. Desperate to join his fellow Frenchmen in the field, Ravel was frustrated by not being able to fight due to his small stature (he was five foot four), although he did drive military vehicles for a while at the Verdun front. He lost countless friends during the War, some of whom he remembered in the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin – each of the six movements is dedicated to the memory of a friend. This desperate situation was compounded by the deaths of both his beloved mother and Debussy. 

Ravel’s despairing outlook is evident in La Valse (1919-20), a pessimistic work in which the dancers emerge out of the swirling mists, innocently at first, until a manic quality begins to take hold eventually driving the whole thing into oblivion.

“We are dancing on the edge of a volcano,” Ravel wrote in his notes on La Valse, quoting the Comte de Salvandy.(Interesting side note - Torvill and Dean used the image of two lovers, unable to be together, casting themselves into a volcano in their famous rendition of Bolero.)  His words are an apt description of both his music and Balanchine’s neo-romantic choreography: couples waltzing in a cavernous ballroom where a woman in white is at once horrified and fascinated by the uninvited figure of death who ultimately claims her life.

On the score itself, Ravel described the “whirling” patterns of the waltz almost surrealistically:

Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855.

Since La Valse was already in the composer’s mind at least a dozen years before the Great War broke out, whether or not the shadow of death that hangs over it can be directly attributed to the war is uncertain. However, Richard Buckle has linked it to the mood of futility in Europe in 1914, likening its Gothic theme to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”. According to James Burnett in Ravel: His Life and Times, the music conveys “some indefinable though unmistakable sense of a danse macabre or totentanz…a frenetic energy about it which carries more than a hint of doom.”

Ravel was intrigued by the disintegration of the waltz form, and envisioned La Valse set in the Imperial Court of Vienna in 1855 (its original title was “Wien”). He called La Valse “a choreographic poem…a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz…the mad whirl of some fantastic and fateful carousel.” The orchestral timbres are reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov’s.  As Lincoln Kirstein wrote, “… the big themes shatter, rhythms dissolve, a persistent beat grows tenuous, and as a succession of feverish motifs dissolve, the climax becomes chaos.”

Feeling decimated and emotionally vulnerable, Ravel withdrew from Paris and took up residence in Monfort-l’Amaury, which would remain his home to the end of his days. His career continued as before, albeit at a slower compositional rate, with the first recordings of his music being issued, constant demands for personal appearances as both conductor and pianist, and a trip to America in 1928. 

Creatively speaking, Ravel found it increasingly difficult to connect with the child-like world of innocence that had colored so much of his pre-War music.  

In Bolero, the ballet’s dramatic arc—simmering with erotic energy as it builds incrementally from the intimate movements of a solo dancer into a ritualized orgy—is shaped entirely by Ravel’s carefully orchestrated score. This music can still thrill, which is why it has been celebrated in its own right in concert halls, recordings and films since its debut in 1928. Yet the composer never understood what all the fuss was about. “I’ve written only one masterpiece—’Boléro,’ ” he told composer Arthur Honegger. “Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”

Ravel felt prouder of his other works for dance—such as “Daphnis et Chloé” (1912), for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and “La Valse” (1920), commissioned by Diaghilev but not produced until George Balanchine comissioned the ballet. In the case of “Boléro,” the composer explained to his friend Gustave Samazeuilh, Ravel had simply set himself a technical task—a study in musical minimalism. The piece would consist of a theme repeated “a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can.” If the description sounds mechanical, that was the idea; he even imagined its performance in a factory setting. The music “constitutes an experiment in a very special and limited direction, and should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything [more],” he told the Daily Telegraph in 1931.

Dancer Ida Rubinstein had quite something else in mind when she first approached Ravel about doing a project together. And it might be that the doom Ravel refered to in La Valse also subconsciously lies at the heart of Bolero as well. I think that this sense of repetition, of notes increasingly becoming stronger and building to a shattering end, underscores a sense of the continuous march of life itself, where we love, laugh, win, lose, until we reach the final end.

That’s when he came up with the idea for a piece to be called “Fandango” (later changed to “Boléro”), and decided that it would have no distinguishing features other than an insistent theme “of the same genre as Padilla, that vulgar author of ‘Valencia.’” That was just the right musical character to aim for. The ballet’s scenario, by Rubinstein and choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, takes place inside a tavern in Spain, where patrons cheer on a gypsy dancer who leaps atop a table to perform; her steps—and the pulses of male onlookers—become increasingly animated as the music intensifies.

Ravel was buried in the Cimetière de Levallois-Perret in the north of Paris, in a grave beside his parents. It is an unassuming black marble affair inscribed merely “Compositeur Français”. Interestingly, the only other celebrity to have been buried in this relatively small cemetery is the designer of the famous tower, Gustave Eiffel.

To this day, Ravel stuns his listeners by an extreme musicality in various forms: sometimes strict, sometimes exotic, sometimes spare, sometimes lavish.  It wasn’t simply the beauty of his works that made him so special: it was the innovative quality they had and the sense of development in his thought and his receptiveness to the influences upon him.

I was reading the article on this subject and decided to post the 10 paradoxes here along with my personal thoughts. Psychology Today: Psychology of Creative People

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.