Treemonisha by Scott Joplin

A Marvelous Return to the Stage

I had the privilege of experiencing a wonderful production of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha two weeks ago. I use the word “privilege” because only a few people heard the piece during Joplin’s lifetime. It’s an opera about the child of a slave who is found under a tree and becomes the leader of her community. The score and piano accompaniment was written and published in 1911. (That version ran 230 pages!) John Stark, Joplin’s publisher, turned it down. Joplin had one concert performance in a hall he paid for in New York, in 1915. But he got no support. So he folded up his score and put it away. Perhaps it was too soon for people, White people especially, to see a work that takes place in 1884 after the abolition of slavery written by a survivor. Many scholars consider Joplin’s opera a didactic work to teach and entertain. It reflects the composer’s political point-of-view that for Black people to advance in the United States, they must get educated, purge themselves of superstitious beliefs and learn self-respect.

For years, according to biographer Rudi Blesh, Joplin wasn’t the same. He worked on the piece for nearly twenty years hoping it would be picked up. But it wasn’t to be. In 1916 his wife had him committed to the Manhattan State Hospital for treatment. According to Blesh, his wife thought Joplin was “suffering the effects of a long delusion: that a Black man could get a grand opera staged.” Joplin died there in 1917. He suffered from syphilis affecting his mental health while leaving him physically debilitated. A crushing end to the composer of Maple Leaf Rag and The Entertainer. He was buried in a pauper’s grave on Long Island, NY.

Treemonisha remained a forgotten work for another sixty years when it was finally produced for the stage in 1972, by Morehouse College and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, GA. The orchestrator was T.J. Anderson who brought the piece to back to life. The director was Katherine Dunham, who led her own African-American dance company and the conductor was the great Robert Shaw who insisted on hiring Black singers for the chorus. The debut was a smashing success leading to more productions including the Houston Grand Opera in 1982 using a score by Joplin scholar, Gunther Schuller. The production I witnessed is a brilliant new orchestration by Jessie Montgomery and Jenina Norpoth who did an excellent job of acknowledging the feel of Joplin’s genre, Ragtime, and its African roots. In the performance a small band of nine players, including a percussionist, filled the hall with sounds and rhythms that spoke to me. It was the perfect blend of new and ancient tones; a hybrid of R&B, Broadway and opera; a beautiful African-American show in story, dance, and music.

As Rudi Blesh concluded, “[Joplin] laid the cornerstone of American music.”

My latest book is Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin