Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha

 


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/uhQ9jBNK91g

Scott Joplin (c. 1868–1917), known as the King of Ragtime, was so much more than that. He had a gift for combining classical music with music local to his childhood home in Texarkana.

Joplin’s opera Treemonisha (composed in 1911) was actually his second opera. The first, A Guest of Honor, which reportedly was based on the White House dinner that Teddy Roosevelt held in 1901 for Booker T. Washington, was performed on a national tour organized by Joplin himself. Some time during the tour, the box office receipts were stolen. In order to cover the payroll and tour expenses, the score for A Guest of Honor was confiscated and was never seen again.

Joplin’s three-act opera Treemonisha is not a ragtime opera, although there are some dance numbers, most particularly in the finale, “A Real Slow Drag.” Gilbert Chase quotes the American Musician and Art Journal issue of June 14, 1911, in which one reviewer wrote of the vocal score, which Joplin had published at his own expense, that the composer had “created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.” Carman Moore says that “the obvious vital ingredient in Treemonisha is the musical genius of Scott Joplin.”

Joplin did not live to see a proper staging of Treemonisha, although he did play the piano in a concert read-through in 1915 in Harlem. The first professional production did not take place until 1975, when the Houston Grand Opera presented a production with orchestration by Gunther Schuller. And in 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in music for Treemonisha.

The story of the opera is one that mattered a great deal to Joplin: the importance of education and overcoming prejudice. Treemonisha is the only Black member of her community who can read and write; she is kidnapped by conjurors who want to stop her from educating the rest of her community. In the end, Treemonisha is rescued and hailed as a teacher and leader.

My classical music post for today is the overture to Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha.

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