How the music that is performed most throughout intercourse triggered a $100m lawsuit

The insistent melody and repeated snare-drum rhythms have become synonymous with carnal desire.

Most famously, the tune is remembered for its key role in the movie 10, when a young Bo Derek explains to a drooling Dudley Moore that Ravel’s Bolero is the perfect accompaniment to sex.

Lasting more than 15 minutes, the 1928 work by the French composer has an orchestration that slowly and pulsatingly builds to a climax.

According to a poll by the digital music service Spotify, Bolero was only pipped by Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack as the most popular music to make love to.

Not surprisingly, the tune is reportedly performed somewhere in the world by musicians every 15 minutes. Not surprisingly, too, it has generated royalties from concerts, recordings and film soundtracks of more than $100million – not forgetting its accompaniment to Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean‘s Olympic gold medal-winning ice-skating performance on Valentine’s Day in 1984.

Now, the fate of its huge royalties is due to be decided later this month in a courtroom in Paris.

Maurice Ravel, who died in 1937, had no descendants. On his death, copyright went to his brother, who married his care-giver, who, in turn, left the rights to her first husband, who married his manicurist. Finally, the copyright ended up belonging to that manicurist’s daughter from a previous marriage.

However, with copyright now deemed to have expired, that woman, Évelyne Pen de Castel, has gone to court to extend the period on the basis that she claims Bolero was jointly written by Ravel and Alexandre Benois, a Russian set designer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dance company, who died in 1960.

If she wins, copyright would be extended until 2039, and would earn her and her three adult children a multi-million-pound fortune. The descendants of Benois, who are backing her claim, also stand to benefit. Under French law, copyright lasts for a minimum of 70 years after the author’s death with extra years added to cover periods such as the Nazi occupation of the Second World War – when artists could not claim royalties.

She is being challenged by France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music, which describes her claim as ‘pure fiction’ and the result of an ‘overflowing imagination’.

Pen de Castel, 74, argues that, crucially, Benois introduced Ravel to the dancer Ida Rubinstein, to whom the work is dedicated.

How apt that a piece of music that is associated today with one of Hollywood’s most famous sex scenes should have started life as a gift to a woman who created roles for herself that often involved nudity and sexually-suggestive scenes.

Rubinstein’s willingness to pose nude in public caused a scandal during the early 1900s.

Born into a rich Jewish family in Russia, she was orphaned as a young girl and began travelling across Europe.

As a dancer, her modern technique was considered scandalous and her role in a performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in 1908, in which she stripped nude, led her to be forcefully placed in a mental health institution. Managing to escape and go to Paris, she worked with the Ballets Russes and began a lesbian affair with the American artist Romaine Brooks, becoming her favourite model due to her ‘fragile and androgynous beauty’. In one allegorical nude, Rubinstein is pictured on a white bed against a black void that has been described as resting in spent sexual satisfaction.

Many decades later, in 1979, it was the turn of Bo Derek to dial up the heat with Bolero.

Then aged 22, the image of her running along the beach with her corn row braids in the film 10 is on a level with Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, Raquel Welch’s fur bikini and the Farrah Fawcett poster as defining images of Hollywood sex symbols.

Movie director Blake Edwards picked Bo Derek for the role after he spotted her at a party. He rated her as a perfect 10.

Playing opposite her was Dudley Moore, whose character, George, was suffering a sexually dissatisfied mid-life crisis.

The film was called 10, but George, spotting Jenny (played by Derek) on the way to her own wedding, rates her at 11 – she’s off the scale. They end up in bed trying to make love to the sound of Ravel’s Bolero.

Five years later, Derek appeared in a low-rent sequel called Bolero – a name inspired by her sex scene in 10. It took two years to make, and the plot sees Derek play a graduate who embarks on a journey to lose her virginity.

It was not the last critically panned film to feature Bolero. And now such a grubby court case about money signals an unedifying finale to the life story of Maurice Ravel, once described as ‘France’s greatest living composer’.

The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky lauded him as the ‘Swiss watchmaker’ of music because of his fastidiousness and precision.

Towards the end of his life, Ravel suffered a brain disorder which neurologists believe was exacerbated by his obsession with repetitive noises – a trademark of Bolero’s mesmeric rhythm.

He hit his head while getting out of a taxi in 1932 and his mental condition deteriorated. He died five years later following cranial surgery. Some biographers have concluded he was gay, though British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams claimed he took him to a Parisian brothel.

Certainly he was a colourful character, dressing like a dandy and occasionally wearing make‑up. Ravel remained a bachelor until his death, sparking the battle over his legacy which remains to this day.

His estate was left to his brother Edouard, and it seemed to be in safe hands. But in 1954, he and his wife Angele were involved in a car accident, and the couple engaged nurse Jeanne Taverne, 48, to help them. Her husband, Alexandre, a former miner and barber, became Edouard’s chauffeur and the couple later moved in with him after his wife’s death.

The inheritance was estimated to be £400 million and Edouard had originally decided to donate more than 80 per cent of the rights to Ravel’s music to the city of Paris. But he changed his mind, naming Jeanne Taverne as his heir.

She duly inherited the fortune, sparking the first of a series of legal battles between Ravel’s relatives. The case dragged on for ten years until 1970, ending up in France’s highest appeal court.

By then, Jeanne had died, and Alexandre had remarried a manicurist called Georgette Lerga, mother of Evelyne Pen de Castel, who lived on the proceeds for almost four decades until she died aged 83, in 2012. It was then that Evelyne Pen de Castel became the custodian of the Bolero millions – until copyright expired in 2016.

She says, however, that trying to fight off suggestions that she and her mother were gold-diggers meant it was a poisoned chalice. She has been mired in controversy since inheriting an estate which she claims is worth £6 million, and setting up a tax-avoidance scheme which was revealed in the Panama Papers – documents that exposed corruption and tax evasion among heads of state, government ministers and celebrities.

Moaning about Press headlines such as ‘The Bolero Mess’ and ‘The Unworthy Heirs’, Pen de Castel has said her family has been ‘undoubtedly despised because they were neither musicians nor notables. Mum was a manicurist; Alexandre was a hairdresser. Small people compared to the intelligentsia’.

She added: ‘According to the media, we had millions stashed away. No way. Yes, Mum made a lot of money, but she didn’t spend it on the high life.

‘Mum mainly spent [the cash] on others. She gave a million to allow me to create the Lionel Perrier Fund for brain cancer research, named after my youngest son, who died. And when friends asked her for money, she always helped.

‘She had a difficult life and never forgot where she came from. She raised me alone after her divorce from my father. She was aware the inheritance should, above all, be used for music. She made donations to academies, financed scholarships and pianos for students. But she spent little on herself.’

But instead of maintaining a low profile, Pen de Castel is set to provoke more controversy with plans to sell the Ravel scores she has secreted in the safe of a bank in Switzerland, valued by auctioneer Christie’s in 2008 at $20 million.

‘What I would like is for an institution or a Ravel lover to buy the whole thing from me so as not to split up the collection,’ she insisted.

So, is the Ravel heritage a blessing or a curse?

‘A blessing, of course, as long as it doesn’t become a curse because of media madness,’ Pen de Castel says. ‘I’m sad my mother was never recognised as a worthy heir even though she did a lot for music.’

While Ravel will be remembered for a piece of music that lasts just over 15 minutes – the amount of time Hollywood directors reckoned the ideal duration for perfect sex – the battle over his legacy millions still pounds away almost 90 years after his death.