BLACK OPERA IN ATLANTA
Drimmer, Melvin
A notable cultural event occurred in Atlanta on January 28 and 29 with the world premiere of Treemonisha, a long-neglected folk opera by the black ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917) ....
...It is in the chorus that Joplin creates a new dimension in black theater—the chorus representing the black people dance to Afro-American music...
...It makes use of American themes and music and is a forerunner of what was later to be the best of American musical theater— Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, and Carousel...
...She is saved and in turn the conjuremen are captured, and the people decide to punish them...
...The Niagara movement and the NAACP indicated that blacks would no longer be satisfied with the political role defined for them by the white majority...
...An opera of plain black folk incorporating ragtime, American folk tunes, and even music of the circus, it was far ahead of its time...
...H. By us...
...What blacks needed, so the middle class maintained, was for the masses to adopt the prevailing American ethos...
...The principal singers were Alpha Floyd, Seth McCoy, Louis Parker, and Simon Estes...
...Almost too late, the Center colleges have realized that they are the heirs to a rich inheritance...
...In the next decade there appeared Bob Cole's and William Johnson's A Trip to Coontown (1898), Cook's Jes Lak White Folks (1899), Bert Williams's and George Walker's Sons of Ham (1899), and three very popular shows featuring Williams and Walker and written by Cook and Jesse Shipp, In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1907...
...Once white actors had made a success out of imitating blacks and doing minstrellike shows, black performers also had to blacken their faces, do the cakewalk, and play to the stereotypes of white audiences...
...What saved these shows was the dancing, music, and songs...
...Quoted in Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press), 1971).] Treemonisha has a totally American setting, that of black farmers immediately after Reconstruction (the opening scene is set in September 1884), living in an all-black community in Arkansas...
...A notable cultural event occurred in Atlanta on January 28 and 29 with the world premiere of Treemonisha, a long-neglected folk opera by the black ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917) . Under the overall direction of Robert Shaw and the stage direction of the legendary dancer Katherine Dunham, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra combined with an all-black company to give the opera a rousing production...
...The closest he came to having the opera performed was in 1915 when he organized a concert version in Harlem, but little interest was shown...
...Only in Atlanta with its self-confident black community could so close a relationship develop between an all-black cast and artistic staff and the symphony...
...As Robert Bone has written about black literature of the time, constant stress was placed on "thrift and industry, initiative and perseverence, promptness and reliability...
...For us...
...It should also be remembered that Shuffle Along featured the Broadway debuts of Josephine Baker and Florence Mills...
...In a time of integrated schools, when black students and scholars for the first time have the option of going elsewhere, black colleges must offer their students and communities more than the standard white educational fare: one of their chief reasons to exist should be to preserve and extend their own heritage...
...The reason, according to Professor Wendell Whalum of Morehouse College and musical director of the Atlanta production, was that the black middle and upper classes did not want to see their older ways portrayed...
...Shaw has proved himself to be an important friend to the Atlanta black cultural scene...
...Reviewers missed the point when they judged it a poor imitation of European opera...
...DuBois gave it definition in Souls of Black Folk...
...Treemonisha and her family are portrayed with dignity...
...Joplin's opera has to be seen in the context of American musical theater in the first two decades of this century...
...Treemonisha, on the other hand, having been educated by a white lady (as Joplin had been educated by a German piano teacher), admonishes the conjuremen...
...Joplin was part of a period in black history that laid the basis for the cultural nationalism of today...
...Black theater is hard to define, but a good effort was made in 1926 by W. E. B. DuBois: Negro Theatre must be: I. About us...
...With royalties from Maple Leaf Rag (1899), Joplin had moved in 1903 from Sedalia, Missouri, to St...
...With this kind of "coon" show Joplin would have nothing to do...
...Last year Shaw directed a performance of Beethoven's Fidelio with a black-white cast and a chorus from Spelman-Morehouse...
...Treemonisha warns the people that ignorance is criminal in this enlightened day, So let us get busy when once we've found the way...
...Will Marion Cook's operetta Clorindy: The Origin of the Cake-Walk, with lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, was produced in New York in 1898...
...It did not pay to be black, or so the faculty was told...
...Near us...
...They show a well-knit black family, magnanimous in victory and vir tuous without being hypocritical...
...Beginning in the late 1890s, black musicians and actors dominated the "coon" shows...
...He gave up the life of itinerant musician for that of music teacher and composer...
...This in fact is the same area where Joplin himself was born, in plantation country just north of Texarkana, Texas...
...What he tried to do, however incomplete, was to create a black theater...
...And the two songs which stop the show, "And Dinah Has Blowed de Horn," and "A Real Slow Drag," represent black musical expression through and through and make no concession to European operatic forms...
...In spite of his fame, Joplin was unable to have his most ambitious work, Treemonisha, commercially published or publicly performed...
...That is, the theatre must cater principally to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by theirentertainment and approval...
...The production took place after a week-long Afro-American Musical Festival at Morehouse College...
...The conjuremen sell roots and charms and try to get the people to believe in their folk medicine to ward off evil...
...Black theater in New York was dominated by the figures of Bert Williams, George Walker, Bob Cole, J. Rosemund Johnson, Will Marion Cook, and Ernest Hogan...
...In 1916 Joplin became mentally ill, and he died months later at Manhattan State Hospital...
...In addition to numerous rags and songs, Joplin composed two operas, A Guest of Honor, written sometime around 1903, and Treemonisha...
...He may not have succeeded because he was trying to mix these two cultures...
...Treemonisha has little in common with the sentimental light operas of Victor Herbert...
...Carter G. Woodson put the black experience on a scientific basis...
...His orchestra has joined with black singers and choruses more than once in joint productions...
...According to one historian of the black theater, "Bert Williams played his typical role of the dull-witted, lazy, unlucky, uneducted Negro who always managed by some stroke of extraordinary stupidity to make the best laid plans go wrong" (Robert A. Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre [College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1947]) . Even in the 1920s, when a number of black musical shows appeared on Broadway, including the smash Shuffle Along (1921) by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, the material was little different...
...IN THE ATLANTA PREMIERE the black commu nity played the key role...
...A Guest of Honor, which Joplin described as a "Ragtime Opera," was given a few performances in St...
...And, very important, at least half of the capacity audiences for the two performances were black...
...The conjuremen kidnap Treemonisha, take her to the forest and decide to punish her...
...For Joplin education and enlightenment are represented in the heroine, Treemonisha, who espouses American-Christian values...
...Through ragtime Joplin gave expression to this self-confidence...
...In New York and Chicago blacks staked out the turf that was to form the basis for their political and cultural power...
...NOTEBOOK There are no black-faced buffoons in this opera...
...That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro lifeas it is...
...Treemonisha intercedes and asks the people to pardon them...
...The black bourgeoisie came out in force, stunningly dressed and coiffured, but black people also filled the balconies and mezzanine...
...The conjuremen see the evil of their ways and the opera ends with Treemonisha elected by the people to lead them out of ignorance and superstition...
...With Katherine Dunham's imaginative choreography, the chorus creates a Midwestern hoe down, a West-Indian-style dance, and ragtime strut...
...But 60 years after its creation the opera serves as a reminder that these two "warring ideals," as DuBois called them, might still be resolved...
...The principal white input came from Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra...
...Remus, Treemonisha's husband, sums up their belief in the aria, "Wrong Is Never Right...
...Wendell Whalum of Morehouse, musical director for the opera, chose local people for the chorus—a night clerk, two housewives, an auto worker, a school principal, three public schoolteachers, a secretary, students from Spelman and Morehouse, members of church choruses, and schoolchildren...
...Louis, but the text has never been found by Joplin scholars...
...This theme was in keeping with the thought of the black middle class at the time...
...Jack Johnson's public defiance of the mores of America made him a champion for the new self-confident black man...
...That is, they must be writtenby Negro authors who understand from birthand continual association just what it means tobe a Negro today...
...The six black colleges of the Atlanta University Center have not always been so hospitable to black culture...
...He became obsessed with the opera and in the last ten years of his life, spent in New York, he tried unsuccessfully to have Treemonisha produced...
...All that was to remain of the opera was the 230-page piano score, which Joplin published and copyrighted in 1911 at his own expense...
...Black theater in the 1900s was mostly the "coon" show...
...394 The opera celebrates the triumph of education over ignorance, enlightment over superstition...
...Never do wrong for revenge In the day or night Wrong must not on right infringe For Wrong is never right...
...a stem regard for duty, injunctions against idleness, and sober warnings against self-indulgence...
...James Weldon Johnson wrote the black anthem in "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing...
...The same week the symphony played the music for Treemonisha, they also performed at the Atlanta University Center in a concert devoted to six contemporary black composers...
...The orchestration for the Joplin opera was brilliantly done by T. J. Anderson, the black composer-in-residence at Morehouse ColNOTEBOOK lege...
...Until the Atlanta production the opera remained both unorchestrated and unperformed...
...Sessions were devoted to Joplin, Paul Robeson, Eubie Black, and Noble Sissle, and to various aspects of African, Caribbean, and Afro-American music...
...Never treat your neighbors wrong By making them feel blue Remember that the whole day long The Creator is watching you...
...The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood nearthe mass of ordinary Negro people...
...The Negro Novel in America [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 19581, p. 13...
...Joplin began writing Treemonisha around 1905, when he was at the height of his fame, "King of the Ragtime...
...Only recently have the black colleges in Atlanta begun to patronize black culture...
...His output was considerable...
...Ignorance and superstition are represented by the conjuremen who, speaking in dialect, express older African values...
...For in the past the administrations of the Center colleges gave little institutional support or recognition to the black experience...
...The black man featured in the shows was epitomized by the character Williams played in Abyssinia...
...In Treemonisha, Joplin set out to create a musical theater that was American and black...
...Louis and bought a 13-room house in a good neighborhood...
...Katherine Dunham, chief choreographer, brought to Atlanta members of her dance company now in residence at Southern Illinois University...
...Despite its obvious defects —absence of dramatic impact, no great ariasTreemonisha is a very original American production...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
