“I have written only one masterpiece,” remarked Maurice Ravel to fellow composer Arthur Honegger, “that is Boléro. Unfortunately, it contains no music.” Ravel’s self-irony notwithstanding, Boléro is one of the most popular musical compositions of all time. It was created for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who was the inspiration for numerous artists of the 1910s and ‘20s, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, André Gide and Darius Milhaud. In 1927 Rubenstein asked Ravel to orchestrate for her some of Isaac Albéniz’s dances from Iberia, but the composer discovered that someone else was already working on those.

Boléro was born out of this confusion. Its premiere on November 22, 1928, with Rubinstein as the solo female dancer and 20 male dancers mostly standing around ogling her, created a sensation. The whole piece consists of the insistent repetition of a single melody of slightly irregular phrasing, accompanied by an ostinato rhythm on the snare drum. Its magic is almost childishly simple: repeating the melody, changing the instrumentation, gradually increasing the volume, and adding more instruments. But the true genius of the piece is in its “punch line,” a sudden unexpected and drastic change of key, at which point the whole meticulous structure explodes.

Boléro was born out of this confusion. Its premiere on November 22, 1928, with Rubinstein as the solo female dancer and 20 male dancers mostly standing around ogling her, created a sensation. The whole piece consists of the insistent repetition of a single melody of slightly irregular phrasing, accompanied by an ostinato rhythm on the snare drum. Its magic is almost childishly simple: repeating the melody, changing the instrumentation, gradually increasing the volume, and adding more instruments. But the true genius of the piece is in its “punch line,” a sudden unexpected and drastic change of key, at which point the whole meticulous structure explodes.

The Spanish boléro is usually a couples dance of moderate tempo in triple meter, different from the Cuban dance by the same name, which is in duple meter. According to tradition, it was invented in 1780 by the dancer Sebastian Cerezo. In the nineteenth century, it became popular with classical composers, including Beethoven, Chopin, Weber and Berlioz.

Program notes by: Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn

Wordpros@mindspring.com / www.wordprosmusic.com