Meticulous to the point of obsession — his manuscripts are almost free of corrections, and Stravinsky called him the Swiss watchmaker. He tried twice to enlist in the First World War, was rejected as too short and too light, and ended up driving a lorry. After a car accident in 1932 his speech and handwriting deteriorated, and he composed almost nothing in his last five years.
He is one of the finest orchestrators who ever lived; his version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition has all but replaced the piano original. Boléro is a seventeen-minute crescendo in which one tune repeats eighteen times and only the scoring changes — he described it himself as a piece without music. In the piano works, listen to the pedalling and the colour: this is not Debussy's haze but a clarity that has been calculated.
