On Music

...Before long, Joplin was trying things within the form none of his fellow ragtimers could even approach...

...His rags were played by everyone able to master their complexities...

...He desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a composer in the European mode...

...Treemonisha is a shotgun wedding of a work, uniting ersatz grand opera with a few fine ragtime numbers...

...The number was an epoch-making composition, one that set the direction for American music down to the present...

...John Stark, who had remained Joplin's publisher, declined Treemonisha once it was finished because it was an opera-not an operetta or light opera-and he had never issued anything remotely like it before...

...Moreover, he was able to take time off for writing and teaching...

...Finally, in 1916, he was committed by his wife to a hospital...

...The production that was first put on in Houston in May, then stopped for a couple of weeks at Washington's Kennedy Center, and has now begun a six-week run in New York City (Uris Theater, through November 2) owes at least as much to Frank Corsaro's direction, Louis Johnson's choreography and Gunther Schuller's orchestration as it does to the music...

...What these talented people have accomplished is so visual that one wonders how the recording of the show by Deutsche Gramaphon will hold up when it is released-something that should happen imminently now that the opera has opened in New York...

...and he did it at a time when whites and blacks rarely entered into contracts as equals...

...He had always been manic-depressive, unable to work at all for extended periods, then suddenly stirred to great furies of creation...

...Joplin's genius was for ragtime, a living and vital form, but he underestimated his ragtime works and seems not to have realized how original, even unique, his contribution to music was...

...Two earlier revivals, both in 1972, failed to win much attention because they were more or less concert versions of the Joplin work, with none of this production's flash, style and energy...

...Treemonisha was not worth the price...

...What nobody could have reasonably expected, though, was that it would make a superb piece of theater...

...No longer did he have to perform for drunks and toughs in the gin dives and honky-tonks that he despised...

...A year later he died...

...Betty Allen and Willard White, as her foster parents, and Curtis Rayam as Remus, her lover, are quite good in the other major parts...

...Carmen Balthrop, in the title role, looks and sounds just right, projecting great purity and intelligence...

...But after an unsuccessful audition performance of Treemonisha in 1915 the bouts of depression grew longer and longer...

...In these moments the opera springs to life brilliantly, making the contrast with the rest pabful...

...Louis...

...There is no recognition of Joplin's celebrity, even fame, as a composer and performer of piano rags in the first decade and more of this century...

...But all of this fades into insignificance once the spectacle starts unrolling before your eyes...

...There is, however, reason to believe that he salvaged some of the material for use in the piano compositions he created so prolifically during that decade...

...Apparently it was performed only once, at a tryout in St...

...In the first 10 years, Maple Leaf Rag sold hundreds of thousands of copies of sheet music...

...The music, in fact, is not as consistently exciting as the staging, although it was composed by a genius, a dance hall piano player who gave the world a totally new musical idiom...

...Actually, my immense respect for Joplin may well have prevented me from wholly enjoying his opera...

...Maple Leaf's success left Joplin well off, if not really wealthy...

...Joplin next decided to publish the score himself, which he did, in a piano-and-vocal version that sorely depleted his resources...

...Stark gave Joplin a $50 advance and a royalty on every copy of sheet music sold, very advantageous terms in those days...

...The Houston Grand Opera Association deserves full credit for bringing Corsaro, Johnson and Schuller together with a complete cast of singers and dancers...

...Named after the Maple Leaf Club, the Sedalia, Missouri, honky-tonk where Joplin and other rag-timers before him had pounded the piano during the 1890s, The Maple Leaf Rag was more than Joplin's first big hit (it was brought out in 1899...

...Fortunately, he was realistic enough to include in Treemonisha a few rag interludes and two ragtime finales...

...The rag was published by John Stark, a local music dealer who dropped by the Maple Leaf one night and heard Joplin play it...

...Out of this desire was born his opera-he never called it a ragtime opera-Treemonisha...

...Over the next several years, those compositions-his famous rags-became increasingly complex harmonically (Euphonic Sounds, Gladiolus Rag) and contrapuntally (Fig Leaf Rag...

...In short, he sacrificed himself and the ragtime music that had made him famous for Treemonisha...

...Throughout the performance, I was unable to forget that the legend behind Treemonisha has, to some extent, falsified the ragtime composer's own history...

...This story may satisfy some for reasons having to do with contemporary racial politics, but it doesn't quite describe the way things were...

...People wanted to play the number, to participate personally in the ragtime revolution sweeping their country...

...Still, their efforts would hardly matter were it not for the way Treemonisha has been staged...

...Now he worked the vaudeville circuit, where he played with the dignity of a concert pianist...

...According to the popular version, the black musician's attempt at a serious work was rejected out of hand because of the color of his skin...

...given all this, it was probably inevitable that a full-scale Treemonisha, Scott Joplin's famous "lost" opera, would be mounted...

...Writing it occupied him for three years, from 1908-11...

...In 1903, Joplin wrote a ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor, that was copyrighted by Stark but never published...

...arid those who couldn't bought piano rolls Joplin made of his own compositions, and listened to them on player pianos, the ur-phonographs of the day...

...His idea of true achievement as a composer was to produce ponderous arias in imitation of a tradition that was all but exhausted at the very time he was trying so tragically to secure a place for himself within it...

...He was for a while the best known writer of popular music in the U.S...

...The sound of early 20th-century America was the sound of Scott Joplin's compositions, such as The Entertainer, Euphonic Sounds, Rose Leaf Rag, and the most popular of them all, The Maple Leaf Rag...

...She won this year's Metropolitan Opera national auditions and has a lovely, beautifully controlled soprano voice to prove it...

...Soon Joplin began sliding slowly, ineluctably, into insanity...

...To begin with, the opera is excellently sung...

...That refusal brought their association to an end...

...No production was ever mounted, and Joplin evidently destroyed the manuscript copy...

...The plot is plain silly, and the libretto is sometimes painfully banal...

...Yet Joplin felt limited...

...In his hands, the rag achieved a type of classical perfection, combining intricacy with grace, ease and immense dignity...

...As a direct result of this, it is commonly believed, Joplin went into a decline and died shortly afterward at the age of 48, penniless and unappreciated...

...Both men benefited greatly from the agreement...

...Rags were not the music he longed to write...

...He dropped his other work to complete it, and for the rest of his life it was an obsession with him...