Word: treemonisha
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...