thomassmith65
2 months ago
According to a possibly apocryphal story from the premiere performance, a woman was heard shouting that Ravel was mad. When told about this, Ravel is said to have remarked that she had understood the piece.
mlsu
2 months ago
And, Ravel did eventually go mad. There's a lot of discussion about whether the recurring patterns in the song had something to do with his neurological condition.
xxr
2 months ago
“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]
“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]
Funny how things rhyme.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...
ericio
2 months ago
RadioLab did an excellent episode [1] about Bolero, where it asks the question if it was a leading indicator of Ravel’s madness.
