Ravel's Boléro

"I've only composed one masterpiece," Maurice Ravel is reported to have said, "and that's the Boléro — unfortunately, it's devoid of music." This tongue-in-cheek remark referred, no doubt, to the piece's ostensible simplicity, as it consists of a two-part melody repeated multiple times. But the Boléro's genius — and the reason why it remains Ravel's most famous and most frequently performed work — lies in the precision of its instrumentation, and its steady, relentless rise in intensity toward an unexpected climax. Find out more about how this perennially popular work came to be and why, all these years later, we can't get enough of it.