Second, Joplin is more than someone who wrote great piano pieces, was black and died. He is part of the story of American classical music that has never really caught the attention of the population, where classic drinks in the musical substrate born here of black and Native American and immigrant peoples become something new. Czech composer Antonin Dvorak called for such music, wrote some examples, such as his symphony No. 9, “From the New World”, but then went home. Gershwin, as I have written, showed the way with “Porgy and Bess” but then died young. Black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and William Levi Dawson continued the mission into the mid-20th century, but racism kept anyone from hearing or knowing what they were doing.
Like Dvorak and Gershwin, Joplin was part of this tradition. Like Gershwin, cut off by death too early, he composed a symphony towards the end of his life, as well as another theatrical play. Also, his ragtime mission didn’t exactly end with him: Over the past half century, rags have been written that intriguingly mix modern classical harmonies (and manual virtuosity) with the ragtime form. William Bolcom’s works in this vein are invaluable. A fun way to master ragtime while having something to play for people in addition to ‘The Entertainer’ is to play Joplin’s ‘Gladiolus Rag’ and then Bolcom’s ‘Graceful Ghost’, one of the most beautiful piano pieces ever written, among the to get the hang of it.
Finally, the meme that Joplin died is frustrated that he never saw “Treemonisha” perform, except for a rickety audition of a lender in an auditorium that didn’t elicit buyers, is false. It was staged in 1913 at a theater in Bayonne, New Jersey. Just because this wasn’t Broadway didn’t mean it was a failure: While Broadway was central in Joplin’s day, the essence of a play’s life lay on the road. Entire careers blossomed on the tour, as they always stopped short on Broadway – “New York is just a grandstand,” actress Minnie Mordern Fiske once said in this era, just one place a performer went through.
Conductor Rick Benjamin (who wrote the masterly liner notes — essentially a book — for this recording of “Treemonisha”) says Joplin couldn’t have pinned his hopes on something so hopelessly unrealistic in the 1910s as white opera houses like New York’s With the setting up a black man’s work on tenant farmers. Joplin wanted to communicate with the black audience of his day, and there is some indication in his score of the opera that he intended it to be played by a small ensemble, the kind that theater houses of modest means would have used at the time. That happened in Bayonne, and scattered advertisements and announcements suggest that for Joplin “Treemonisha” was an ongoing project that he aimed at the locations he could find.
To get a sense of the man, I can’t resist recommending the 1970s biopic “Scott Joplin,” starring Billy Dee Williams. The dashing Williams was delightfully miscast as the rather reserved and socially unmemorable Joplin, but he did his job, and his charm at least helps dispel any idea that Joplin’s life was a miserable failure. The film has a fantastic cutting contest scene, which featured veteran pianist and composer Eubie Blake. And of course the music is ambrosial.
