Scott Joplin: From Rags to Opera

By William Bender

Found beneath a sacred tree, destined to lead her people, the baby girl enters the world like a new Moses. Raised on an Arkansas plantation by the freed slaves Ned and his wife Monisha, she is given the name Treemonisha because she likes to play under the tree. Except for Ned and Monisha, the farm hands are deeply superstitious and tremble when the conjurer Zodzetrick, known as the "goofer dus' man, "comes around with his bags o' luck. Ned and Monisha hope that Treemonisha will grow up to lead the people away from the captivity of their ignorance and fear. Accordingly, in exchange for laundering and woodchopping, they arrange to have the girl educated by a nearby white family. Convinced that Treemonisha's learning is a threat to them, Zodzetrick and his fellow conjurers kidnap her for a night of voodoo-like terror. Rescued by her friend Remus (disguised as a scarecrow), Treemonisha astonishes everyone by urging forgiveness. "You will do evil for evil, if you strike them, you know," she tells her people. They understand and acclaim Treemonisha as their leader.

That is the plot of one of the great curios in all American opera. Treemonisha was composed by the ragtime genius Scott Joplin. Completed in 1911, it was never staged during his lifetime, nor at all until 1972, early on in the current Joplin revival. Last May it was presented by the Houston Grand Opera, with new orchestrations by Composer Gunther Schuller and choreography by Louis Johnson. So successful was the production, directed by Frank Corsaro, that it has been transported intact to Washing ton's Kennedy Center for a three-week run. Later this month it will open on Broadway at the Uris Theatre.

Be it the Broadway musical, operetta or grand opera itself, the musical stage has few works as innocent and pure as Treemonisha. Joplin called his work an opera and structurally it is one. He wrote his own libretto and decked it out with orchestral preludes, choruses, solos, duos, even a quintet, in a way that indicated he probably knew the works of Weber and Flotow. The spirit of the work, though, hovers somewhere between operetta and masque. The use of ragtime is limited to exhilarating dance finales: Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn at the end of Act I and A Real Slow Drag at the final curtain. Elsewhere one can find a waltz and even barbershop quartet. Infusing everything is Joplin's ear for melody, which made his rags so fetching and regaling.

Dramatically, Treemonisha calls for a certain amount of forebearance. Its message (improving the lot of the Negro) is treated naively, and its solution (education) is somewhat simplistic. Treemonisha works for an audience of today because Joplin kept his touch light despite heavy use of dialect ("No, dat bag you'se not gwine to buy, 'cause I know de price is high"). His is a fable that James Thurber might have appreciated.

This production accepts Treemonisha's old-fashioned charm and innocence without embarrassment. Says Schuller, an expert on ragtime and jazz: "There are certain kinds of primitive art works that must be preserved as they originally were. Treemonisha is one of them. It just won't work if you try to sass it up or modernize it for Broadway." This is easier said than done, especially in scoring the work; only Joplin's piano edition has survived. Schuller's orchestration radiates not just the ring of authenticity but the growl and wail as well.

Corsaro, a veteran director of Broadway and opera, has given Treemonisha a dreamy, timeless feel that softens its awkward edges and enlarges its fable. He and Designer Franco Colavecchia have conceived sets that underline that aura of make-believe. The plantation cabins, for example, are shells that are held up on poles by supers. The rainbow that greets Treemonisha's ascendancy to leadership is an arch of ribbons. Dancers with alligator and bear masks move in and out of the voodoo scene. Louis Johnson's choreography does have a touch of Broadway pizazz. But when those good plantation folks turn from corn husking to "goin' around" (square dancing), it is hard to believe that anything so bouncy could have been rehearsed, let alone laid out in advance. The performance benefits enormously from the authority of Betty Allen's Monisha and Willard White's Ned, not to mention Schuller's buoyant conducting. But it is Carmen Balthrop as Treemonisha who is easily the hit of the evening. Winner of the 1975 Metropolitan Opera auditions, she still moves too cautiously on stage, but her lyric soprano voice has an appealing woodwind glow and she uses it with authority.

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It was not enough that the sheet music of Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold more than a million copies and made the son of a former slave well-to-do almost overnight. Not for Scott Joplin. As a youth he may have earned his living playing honky-tonk piano by night in a string of saloons and bordellos in the South and Midwest. But what few realized was that he was expertly tutored in harmony, counterpoint and the works of the classical masters.

Joplin's musical genius was enormous and precocious. He was born in 1868 at Texarkana into a family that took music as its birthright. The father, a laborer, played the violin; the mother sang and picked banjo. Joplin started out on the guitar and bugle, but at age seven discovered the piano and was soon teaching himself to improvise.

After his mother's death, and one argument too many with his father about learning a trade, the boy left home for good at age 14 to become a honky-tonk pianist. It was the only trade he cared about. No doubt Joplin could play "ragged time," as it was first called because of its bouncing bass and syncopated right hand, as bumptiously as the next man. But by the time he began writing his rags down in the late 1890s, they had obviously become objects of care, even personal meaning for him.

Schuller in his book Early Jazz, the first volume of his The History of Jazz, makes a convincing case for the European march as a source of the rag. A typical Joplin rag has a disciplined arrangement of repeats and returns not unlike that of the march, and a similar duple tune signature. Jazz probably got its start, Schuller believes, when saloon pianists who could not read music began improvising rags they had heard.

By the 1920s ragtime was forgotten. So was the softspoken, thoughtful Joplin, a friendly man who had always been willing to listen to other musicians. He was apparently something of a wandering lover, as the dedications of The Sycamore to Minnie L. Montgomery and Leola to Miss Minnie Wade suggest. But he craved the comfort and security of marriage. His first failed: the former Belle Hayden had no interest in his music, and their baby daughter died in infancy. His second marriage, to Lottie Stokes, seemed perfect, and Lottie stood by him as he exhausted himself and his money trying to get Treemonisha produced. The only way he could get it published was to do it himself. Burned out at 48, Joplin died in 1917 in an asylum from complications of syphilis.

Clear Chords. The current Joplin vogue is now five years old. it began when a record company, Nonesuch, began issuing Joplin albums played by such "straight" pianists as Joshua Rifkin and William Bolcom. It gained distinction in 1972 when Vera Brodsky Lawrence, an ex-concert pianist, brought out a two-volume edition of Joplin's printed music. The film The Sting made Joplin's The Entertainer a national hit. This year came the bestselling novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (TIME, July 14); a central figure is the black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. As Walker sits down to play Joplin's Wall Street Rag, Doctorow writes: "Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music." Scott Joplin would have liked that.

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