About the work
Boléro is an orchestral composition by Maurice Ravel, written in 1928 after the dancer Ida Rubinstein commissioned a Spanish-themed ballet from him. Ravel composed the piece between July and October 1928; it premiered as a staged ballet on 22 November 1928 at the Paris Opéra, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska with sets by Alexandre Benois.
Plot
The original scenario is set in a Spanish tavern, where a female dancer begins to move on a tabletop under a lamp and is gradually surrounded by an ever-growing crowd of men. Musically, the piece consists of two sixteen-bar themes repeated eighteen times over an unchanging bolero rhythm in the snare drum, while the orchestration continually thickens in one long, unbroken crescendo.
Cultural significance
Ravel told fellow composer Arthur Honegger that Boléro was his only masterpiece — one, he added, that contained no music. The work nonetheless became one of the most popular orchestral pieces of the twentieth century, famously used by Torvill and Dean for their gold-medal ice dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics, and remains a staple of ballet companies' repertoires today.