In celebration of this momentous Independence Day, America’s semiquincentennial, WRTI will broadcast Treemonisha, a rarely performed yet pivotal opera composed by Scott Joplin. Classical Program Director Zev Kane will host this program at 1 p.m. on July 4, as our weekly opera broadcast.
Zev, having spent his formative years in St. Louis — where Joplin wrote The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag — and New York — where Joplin wrote Treemonisha — has a personal connection to the work of Joplin. He provided a few words on the significance of Treemonisha and ragtime to the American musical tradition. “I believe ragtime is the most original and intuitive American artform.” he says, “It is a musical representation of our melting pot, defined by its rhythmic manifestations of hope, persistence, and surprise. There's no finer demonstration of its expressive capacity than Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, an unsung and deeply engaging masterpiece that we're thrilled to share on America's 250th birthday.”
Joplin completed Treemonisha in 1911, working tirelessly until his death in 1917 trying to get it to the stage. Joplin never lived to see a full production of the opera, and it remained almost entirely forgotten until its world premiere at Morehouse College in 1972. Saturday’s broadcast will spotlight a 1976 recording from the Houston Grand Opera, with Gunther Schuller conducting his own orchestration of Joplin’s surviving piano-vocal score. Joplin would receive a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Treemonisha is set in 1884, in a free Black sharecropping community on a former slave plantation near the city of Texarkana, where Joplin himself grew up. Joplin included a preface to the opera, in which he explains the community’s insistent beliefs in folk magic and superstition. Treemonisha is a young, well-educated freedwoman in the community who is highly skeptical of superstition. She learns from her mother that she is not her biological child; she was discovered as a lone infant beneath a tree. Treemonisha laments this discovery before ultimately expressing gratitude to her adoptive parents.
When a group of conjurers come peddling a variety of folk charms and talismans, the outspoken Treemonisha encourages her community to abandon their superstitions and be skeptical of their wares. Upset that Treemonisha foiled their scheme, the conjurers kidnap her and take her to the woods, planning to throw her into a wasp’s nest. She is rescued by her friend, Remus, and while they are finding their way home, the conjurers are captured and taken prisoner by the community. Although Treemonisha’s father, Ned, seeks punishment for the conjurers, Treemonisha encourages him to show them mercy. Recognizing Treemonisha’s knowledge, courage, and moral fortitude, the town elects her to be their new leader.
Treemonisha can only be described as visionary. At a time when American opera was still dominated by European operatic conventions, Joplin went against the grain, synthesizing Treemonisha from the rich and diverse sounds of American folk music: ragtime, Black spirituals, folk-dances, and early vaudeville.Treemonisha’s themes were similarly transgressive, depicting the milieu of free Black Americans, featuring an outspoken, educated Black woman as a protagonist, and culminating with her election into a position of civic power.
While Treemonisha’s conceptual prematurity may have been a reason for its failure to reach production, its unfinished state made it ripe for endless reinterpretation after its revival. Zachary Woolfe, writing for the New York Times, points to two recent, heavily reinterpreted productions “as sterling examples of how art of the past can take on new life in a new era.” Treemonisha’s unfortunate fall into obscurity allowed it to reemerge as something even grander than what Joplin had intended: an artistic baseboard for the expression of new, radical ideas; a testament to how much progress has been made in the acceptance of Black artistic traditions as foundational and distinctly American; and an important reminder that justice is not only a restructuring of the present and future, but a rediscovery of, and reconciliation with, the past.
CAST:
Carmen Balthrop as Treemonisha
Willard White as Ned
Betty Allen as Monisha
Curtis Rayam as Remus
Cora Johnson as Lucy
Kenneth Hicks as Andy
Ben Harney as Zodzetrick
Dorceal Duckens as Luddud
Dwight Ransom as Cephus
Raymond Bazemore as Simon
Edward Pierson as Parson Alltalk
Gunther Schuller conducts the Houston Grand Opera orchestra and chorus.