Music1928
Boléro
Maurice Ravel
A single unrelenting crescendo — Ravel's orchestral tour-de-force, premiered at the Paris Opéra.
About this work
Commissioned as a ballet score and premiered at the Palais Garnier in 1928 with Ida Rubinstein dancing on a tavern table, Boléro remains one of the most recognizable orchestral pieces in the repertoire. Its mechanical, hypnotic structure — one melody, two instruments, seventeen minutes, no development — was a radical formal experiment that Ravel himself called "a piece for orchestra without music."