Ravel's Bolero

[David]

These are clickable thumbnail scans of the Roger Branga eight-page solo piano transcription of the "Bolero" which I've been messing about with lately during the Ledge gentrification.

Ravel wrote to Calvocoressi: "Before its first performance, I issued a warning that what I had written was a piece consisting entirely of orchestral tissue without music -- of one long, very gradual crescendo to last exactly seventeen minutes."

Exactly seventeen minutes? Could Ravel have been joking about that? It sounds like his waggishness. (The first time he tried out for the Prix de Rome, Ravel was given a text & told to create a cantata. He thought it was so stuffy that he put it to waltz time. The Prix judges responded: "He will not go unpunished for taking us for imbeciles.")

The "Bolero" itself I've always considered something of a joke, a sendup of something or other, perhaps mocking his own earlier "La Valse" with its creeping madness, its crazed hallucinogenic evolution, exploding in a flood of brio & sound in the final measures, when form seems either unable or unwilling to contain concept. Both "La Valse" & "Bolero" adhere to the dramatic arc of sexual orgasm & demise or spentness.

Enjoy! Live long & happily & do a merry dance!