Read on to discover how the music of Ravel has been used in popular culture, from films to sport to computer games...
Who was Maurice Ravel?
Born in 1875, the French composer Maurice Ravel celebrates his 150th anniversary in 2025. And like the man himself – exquisitely tailored – Ravel’s music betrays an artfulness that so often cultivates a surface simplicity while harbouring depths in no hurry to make themselves known.
For Ravel, composing was about refining and eliminating. Obsessed with the quest for ‘technical perfection’, he confided that striving ‘unceasingly to this end… I am certain of never being able to achieve it’. A ceaseless desire for reinvention and renewal was an intrinsic part of Ravel’s psyche, and it nourished a world intrigued by exoticism: from fairytale enchantment to the ‘otherness’ (as he called it) of music from Russia and the East; from the re-imagination of the past to jazz.
Ravel in popular culture... In film
‘Did you ever do it to Ravel’s Boléro?’ asks the beautiful Jenny (Bo Derek) to a spluttering George (Dudley Moore) as they sit cosily together on a sofa listening to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in the 1979 romantic comedy 10. Shortly after, she gets up, takes the Prokofiev off the stereo and the nightrobe off her shoulders, and the soundtrack changes to said Boléro…
Ravel in popular culture... In cartoons
Boléro appears twice in The Simpsons, both in reference to the above scene from 10. Fans of the yellow family also get to hear Pavane pour une infante défunte, which briefly makes an appearance elsewhere in the long-running series.
Ravel in popular culture... At the Olympics
Beginning on their knees and ending lying on the ice, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s gold medal-winning routine to Boléro at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo instantly turned millions of TV-watching Brits into ice dance fans. For a short while afterwards, too, Ravel enjoyed his moment as the nation’s favourite composer.
Ravel in popular culture... In computer games
Released in 2016, Civilization VI invites gamers to create a civilisation from scratch and then, by various means, build it up into a world power. Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, which forms part of the game’s soundtrack, is there to help them with their ambitious endeavours.
Ravel in popular culture... In TV adverts
‘This is the man who put a million on black, and it came out red… who married a sex kitten, just as she turned into a cat.’ So lamented the voice on a 1984 TV advert for Volkswagen Golf, accompanied by doleful piano and strings. Though not Ravel itself, the music’s debt to the Adagio assai second movement of his Piano Concerto in G was not hard to spot.