Marching Onward: Notions of Racial Uplift in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha
Written by: Lee Bynum — VP, Impact
Even forty years prior to Brown v. Board of Education being argued before the Supreme Court, Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha had a clear imperative to lay bare the relationship between civil rights and schooling. At first blush, Joplin might seem like an unlikely candidate to have written an opera with these themes — or any opera at all, for that all matter. However, he was passionate about the Black experience being represented in the concert hall and opera house.
Even forty years prior to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka being argued before the Supreme Court, Treemonisha had a clear imperative to lay bare the relationship between civil rights and schooling. Completed in 1911, Scott Joplin’s little-known opera, Treemonisha, is a parable where education triumphs over ignorance to bring about racial equality. The opera is set in Reconstruction-era Texarkana and focuses on a community of recently emancipated African Americans who cling to superstition and tradition. A young adoptee named Treemonisha, who has received a formal education, works to liberate the town from its reliance on folklore and magical thinking. This leads to her kidnapping, in order to prevent any disruption to the established social order. After being rescued by her paramour and returned to her community, Treemonisha pleads for mercy for her captors, as she believes everyone deserves a place in the polity. Because of her thoughtful, inclusive perspectives, she is elected leader of the town, thereby acknowledging the central role education plays in the progress of the Black community.
At first blush, Joplin might seem like an unlikely candidate to have written an opera with these themes — or any opera at all, for that all matter. Joplin helped launch the ragtime craze, which lasted from 1897 to 1917, when the nation’s attention turned away to World War I. So popular were these compositions — “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899), “The Entertainer” (1902), and “The Pine Apple Rag” (1908) sold millions of copies of sheet music — that middle-class families around the country raced to purchase pianos so that their parlors could be filled with syncopated joy. While his name is synonymous with the forty-two rags he published, Joplin was fluent in multiple genres: he also wrote a few musicals; a vaudeville show; a symphony; waltzes, tangos, and ballets; and educational works. His reputation as a ragtime composer belies the actual breadth of his oeuvre. In fact, Treemonisha was his second opera; A Guest of Honor, composed to commemorate Booker T. Washington’s controversial 1901 dinner at Teddy Roosevelt’s White House, toured nationally five years before Treemonisha. He was an admirer of the writings of both Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and the political philosophies of both leaders undergird Joplin’s central message of education as the instrumentality for self-actualization and community — that is, racial — uplift. Richard Kogan, a psychiatrist-cum-concert pianist who trained at Harvard and Juilliard, theorized, “When you listen to classic ragtime pieces and note the basic tension between the metrically rigid bassline and the captivating, syncopated melodic lines, you can almost hear it as the struggle and eventual triumph of freedom over slavery.” These racial justice values repose quite comfortably in Joplin’s work.
Joplin was passionate about seeing the African American experience represented in the concert hall and opera house, treated as reverentially as any Eurocentric subject matter. Elisabet Omarene de Vallée posited, “[Two] of Joplin’s concerns in composing [opera] were to pioneer the creation of works written especially for Black singers and establish a library of important African American theatrical works.” He even formed his own publishing house, as well as the short-lived Scott Joplin Ragtime Opera Company, to facilitate the process. Never fully satisfied with being known as a purveyor of popular music, Joplin, like Harry Lawrence Freeman, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Will Marion Cook, Louis Chauvin, and other contemporaneous composers of color, also sought recognition for creating more substantive work.
Joplin’s notion of community-building eschewed simple binaries related to gender, class, geography, and political ideology, as he understood that uplift is realized most fully through syncretism. In particular, the community’s selection of Treemonisha as their leader was an expression of hope for a more progressive future, in which the leadership of Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ida B. Wells would be embraced enthusiastically. Treemonisha’s characterization prefigures the rise to positions of prominence of Stacey Abrams, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. This radical woman-centered approach was not accidental; the unique title was derived from the Sanskrit word meaning “intelligent woman.”
According to Klaus-Dieter Groß, “Joplin projected into Treemonisha his own dreams of being a cultural as well as a cultured leader.” His libretto is scaffolded on several autobiographical details. Julius Weiss, an émigré from Germany, had been his first music teacher, and his mentorship changed the trajectory of Joplin’s life; this story is repackaged for Treemonisha’s origin. Freddie Alexander and Lottie Stokes, Joplin’s second and third wives, respectively, also serve as inspirations for the eponymous character. Additionally, the libretto features some elements of the Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox tales that would have been so familiar to African Americans in the early Twentieth Century. The assignation of dialect types to various characters and discrete scenes is purposeful and judicious. Joplin’s text employs basilectal variation to differentiate between social classes, signify character development, and underscore key messages. Specifically, Treemonisha’s dialogue is musically and lyrically distinct from that of community members until just before she assumes the mantle of their leader, bolstering her leadership is a unifying force. Although his compositions were contemporaneous with those of better-known composers Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Antonín Dvořák, Joplin’s operatic work bears little stylistic resemblance to their music. With arias, recitative, choruses, and a ballet, Treemonisha was written in the European operatic tradition, but African American musical forms, including antiphony, revival hymns, jubilee songs, and cakewalks, notably are utilized in “We Will Trust You as Our Leader,” “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed the Horn,” and “We’re Goin’ Around (A Ring Play).”
He considered the work his magnum opus. Early on, it suffered a number of setbacks, including the withdrawal of the original producing theatre. In 1915, Joplin expended most of his savings producing a concert-style backers’ audition at Harlem’s Lincoln Theatre. Treemonisha’s aesthetic was quite a bit afield of the realm of Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert, where audiences tastes lay. Moreover, urbane Harlemites might have been so far removed from their forebears’ Southern roots that the pastoral setting may have obscured the more relevant central themes. And the proto-feminist message of women’s empowerment likely discomfited many. The audience’s tepid response is said to have shattered Joplin, exacerbating the mental decline he already was experiencing due to syphilis. Scott Joplin died just two years later at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, with an empty bank account and his dreams for Treemonisha largely left unrealized.
The hand-written orchestral parts for both Treemonisha and A Guest of Honor were destroyed fifty years later, leaving only a reduced piano score at the archives of the Library of Congress. Lamentably, the score essentially remained unheard until an October 22, 1971 concert performance presented by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, featuring composer-pianists Mary Lou Williams and William Bolcom, Joplin specialist Joshua Rifkin, and bass-baritone Simon Estes. The following year, legendary choreographer Katherine Dunham staged a production with the Afro-American Music Workshop of Morehouse College and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Shaw. Houston Grand Opera staged a full production in May 1975, which toured nationally, and after narrowly missing derailment by a musicians’ strike, played on Broadway from October 21 to December 14, 1975. Directed by Frank Corsaro, the cast featured Betty Allen, Sir Willard White, future Tony-winner Ben Harney, and Carmen Balthrop alternating with Kathleen Battle in the title role, as well as a production design inspired by the work of famed artist Romare Bearden. The Houston production was mounted again for a 1982 public television broadcast. Beyond Broadway, Treemonisha was presented at the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood, Wolf Trap, Macalester College, and throughout Europe.
The revival of interest in Joplin’s work resulted in a special posthumous citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee in 1976, a Motown-produced biopic with Billy Dee Williams and Eubie Blake the following year, and a commemorative postage stamp in 1983. In addition, Joplin’s music was interpolated into Marvin Hamlisch’s Academy Award-winning score of The Sting in 1973. Subsequently, Treemonisha was produced again by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2000, and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra in 2003; the latter production resulted in a 2011 complete recording of the score, with Janinah Burnett, Chauncey Packer, Phumzile Sojola, and Anita Johnson. In 2018, a reimagined version of the work was commissioned by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre Company and Moveable Beast Collective; the international creative team was comprised primarily of women of color, including director Weyni Mengesha, librettist Leah-Simone Bowen, dramaturg Deanna Downes, and arranger Jessie Montgomery, who recently was engaged to compose a work for the Metropolitan Opera. Although Treemonisha has not been enshrined in the American operatic canon yet, the score has been celebrated for its uniquely American style. The opera’s closing chorus, “A Real Slow Drag,” has been covered by a wide range of classical, jazz, and blues artists. Indeed, the finale is not simply a celebratory stop-time dance, but rather, it’s a credo for the African American drive towards equality:
Move along, don’t stop,
Don’t stop…
Marching onward, marching onward,
Marching to that lovely tune;
Marching onward, marching onward,
Happy as a bird in June.
