Maurice Ravel’s Bolero is one of the world’s most recognisable and popular pieces of classical music and, until recently, one of the most profitable.
Composed in 1928, it is said to be played every 15 minutes somewhere in the world and provided the soundtrack for the gold medal performance of the British ice skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
Until 2016, when it fell out of copyright, it generated tens of millions of euros in royalties for a small group of people who were the distant heirs of the childless French composer. Now they are taking legal action to reclaim its copyright for another 20 years, arguing that Ravel did not write it alone.
In most countries copyright