R E M E M B E R Oh What a World, a 2004 song written by Rufus Wainwright? Two minutes and forty three seconds into the song and bang! you are hit by several bars of Ravel’s Bolero. The song sounds happy and celebratory, embracing Ravel’s theme, but unlike Ravel’s, it ends in a descending scale of uncertainty.
I love Ravel. Everybody loves Bolero. But Ravel himself said to fellow composer Arthur Honegger: “I have written only one masterpiece. That is Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music.”(1) “In France,” Madeleine Gross tells us in Bolero, la vida de Maurice Ravel, Ed. Peuser, Buenos Aires, 1945, “there is a saying: It is the sauce that makes the fish taste good. (“La sauce fait passer le poisson.”) In the case of Bolero, the theme is the fish, the instrumentation is the sauce.” When he was composing the piece (1928), Ravel explained in a letter to Joaquín Nin that his work had “pas de forme proprement dite, pas de développement, pas, ou presque pas de modulation; un theme [très simple] du rhythme et de l’orchestre.”(2)
I was listening to Rufus Wainwright recently, doing Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows. I don’t pay attention to lyrics but it just dawned on me that this 32-year-old song was prophetic, as if Mr. Cohen, a singer, songwriter, and poet, was forecasting Covid: “And everybody knows that the Plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast.” Poets and songwriters are seers, voyants, as Arthur Rimbaud wrote in a letter to his friend Paul Demeny in May 1871: “The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains.”
— New York City, 6/30/2020
(1) H.H. Stuckenschmidt, Maurice Ravel Variations on His Life and Work, Calder and Boyars, London, 1969, p. 230. (2) Madeleine Gross, op. cit., pp. 10-15.