Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, a Basque fishing town near the Spanish border, and raised in Paris, where he stayed. He composed slowly and polished obsessively; Stravinsky called him a Swiss watchmaker, and the description stuck because it fit. Small, dapper, and private, he never married and kept his inner life mostly to himself.

During the First World War he drove a supply truck near the front. Afterward came the works most people meet first: La valse, a waltz that gradually spins itself apart, and Boléro, a single tune repeated for a quarter of an hour over a snare drum while the orchestra slowly swells around it. He considered Boléro an experiment and was startled to watch it become his most popular piece.

Boléro is where many people begin, and that is fine. Pair it with the Piano Concerto in G, whose slow movement is Ravel at his most tender.