Word: treemonisha
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...deterioration that ended with his death in Manhattan in 1917 at age 49. Joplin earned a penny for each copy of The Maple Leaf Rag that was sold, but he died broke as a result of his creeping insanity and his quixotic efforts to publish and produce his opera Treemonisha...
...author gives equally detailed attention to Joplin's music -- the early parlor songs, the magnificent piano rags, the waltzes and marches and Treemonisha, his great last work. Berlin's analysis is always illuminating and expert; however, nonmusical readers may have trouble following his arguments, illustrated as they are by plentiful examples from scores. There are tantalizing references to such lost works as a symphony, a piano concerto and the opera A Guest of Honor, which was registered for copyright in 1903, although no copy of the score is known to exist...
...been as important as any documented event. Joplin had a fierce desire to show the whites in America that blacks were their equal in every respect. Repeatedly he admonished his fellow blacks that education was the way to first-class citizenship, and indeed that is the explicit theme of Treemonisha...
Like its incendiary subject, X is notable not only for its accomplishment but also for what it represents. Before X, the number of great authentic African-American operas stood at precisely one: Scott Joplin's underrated Treemonisha, which foreshadowed X's themes of black self-reliance and self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis...
...touring Texas Opera Theater, which has successfully made a home in Texas and five nearby states; next month, for instance, Sousa's saucy operetta El Capitan again takes to the road. Gockley is perhaps most proud of the two Houston shows that reached Broadway: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha last fall and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess this week. "Why can't grand opera produce something like Kiss Me, Kate"? he asks. If anyone is going to come up with the answer some day, it could well be Houston's Gockley...