Word: joplin
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...