Ravel’s Bolero is our favourite piece of music; not that we know very many. We play it on journeys in the car, loudly.
It has only two tunes, repeated twice, five times, with ever increasing volume until the full orchestral climax and final exhausted collapse.
The two tunes seem to be like life and death, hope and tragedy, defiance and decline. They affect me every time with primal force.
Our lives are surrounded by tragedy and often touched by it. Decline and decay seem to be the inevitable winners concluding only in death’s awful victory and oblivion.
But time and again a defiant song of hope arises, the very defiance of life in the face of death and entropy. It resonates deeply within, thrills and moves with joy and transcendence.
By the end when a titanic crescendo convulses and crashes in ruins I’m simply exultant and invigorated.
For life is by definition the contradiction of death and entropy. It harnesses energy to leap uphill with beauty and poise in the teeth of cruel chaos. It laughs in fleeting gaiety as the shadows close in again, for nothing can extinguish the joie de vivre as a reality, however transient.
And beyond Bolero, prefigured there and in the world around, is the Life that defied death, and won. Oh death, where is your sting?
Piersblog 