Treemonisha
Treemonisha is a three-act opera with music and libretto by the American composer Scott Joplin, completed around 1911.[1] Set in rural Arkansas in 1884 among a community of former slaves, it follows the titular character—a young woman discovered as an infant under a sacred tree and educated in literacy—who emerges as a leader, rescuing her people from superstitious "conjure" practices and championing education as the path to progress.[1][2] Joplin self-published the piano-vocal score in May 1911 at his own expense, exhausting much of his resources in pursuit of a production, but secured only a partial read-through performance during his lifetime.[3][4] The work blends ragtime syncopations and African-American folk elements with European operatic structures, including an overture and ensemble numbers like "A Real Slow Drag," to explore tensions between tradition and enlightenment in post-emancipation Black society.[1][2] Despite Joplin's fame from ragtime hits like "Maple Leaf Rag," Treemonisha remained unstaged until 1972, when Morehouse College presented a student production; the Houston Grand Opera's 1975 mounting, featuring a full orchestration, marked its professional debut and spurred ragtime's revival, earning Joplin a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976.[1][2] This opera stands as Joplin's sole surviving stage work, underscoring his ambition to elevate ragtime into grand opera while addressing community uplift through knowledge over mysticism.[1]Background and Composition
Joplin's Motivations and Early Efforts
Scott Joplin, born on November 24, 1868, in northeastern Texas shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, experienced the immediate post-slavery era firsthand through his family's circumstances. His father, Giles Joplin, a former enslaved man from North Carolina, worked as a railroad laborer, while his mother, Florence, a freeborn woman from Kentucky, served as a cleaner and laundress; both parents were musicians, exposing young Scott to violin, banjo, and guitar in the Texarkana area where the family settled around 1875.[5] These early observations of freedmen's struggles with poverty, superstition, and limited education shaped Joplin's conviction that music could foster moral and intellectual advancement among African Americans, a belief he later articulated through ambitious compositions aimed at elevating Black cultural expression beyond popular entertainment.[6] By the late 1890s, Joplin's breakthrough with the 1899 publication of "Maple Leaf Rag," which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and generated royalties exceeding $300 annually at its peak, afforded him financial independence to transition from piano rags to more grandiose forms.[7] This success fueled his determination to compose operas that promoted self-reliance and education as antidotes to ignorance in Black communities, reflecting a personal ideology of racial uplift through artistic achievement rather than reliance on white patronage.[8] His initial foray into opera came in 1903 with A Guest of Honor, a two-act ragtime work inspired by the controversy surrounding Booker T. Washington's 1901 dinner at President Theodore Roosevelt's White House, which Joplin copyrighted on February 16 but whose score was never published and is now lost; rehearsals involved a touring company of about 32 performers, yet the project collapsed amid logistical and financial hurdles.[8][9] Undeterred by the failure of A Guest of Honor, Joplin persisted in self-funding his operatic ambitions, channeling earnings from ragtime into larger-scale efforts despite mounting personal debts and the era's racial barriers to Black composers seeking orchestral venues.[10] This independent streak, evident in his rejection of quick commercial gains for sustained artistic projects, underscored his motivation to craft works like the forthcoming Treemonisha as vehicles for communal enlightenment, drawing directly from folk traditions observed in his youth to advocate progress over superstition.[11] By 1907, as he began outlining Treemonisha, Joplin's efforts crystallized around a narrative of leadership and learning, prioritizing long-term cultural impact over immediate profitability even as royalties from earlier hits waned.[12]Development Process (1907–1911)
In 1907, Scott Joplin relocated to Harlem, New York City, seeking publishers and producers for his opera Treemonisha, which he had begun developing earlier.[13][14] There, he worked intermittently on the composition while supplementing his income through piano teaching and performances, amid growing financial pressures.[1] Joplin completed the 230-page piano-vocal score by 1910, but faced rejection from potential publishers unwilling to support the full project.[4] Lacking external backing, he personally financed and handwrote the parts for self-publication of the piano-vocal version in New York in 1911.[1] These efforts occurred against the backdrop of Joplin's emerging health decline, attributed to syphilis contracted years earlier, which began impairing his productivity even as he persisted without assistance in notating the score.[1][15] The logistical challenges, including the absence of orchestral support and reliance on manual preparation, underscored his determination amid deteriorating personal circumstances.[4]Influences from Prior Works
Treemonisha marked Scott Joplin's culmination of efforts to expand ragtime beyond piano solos into theatrical forms, building directly on his earlier experiments with extended compositions. His first venture into stage music was the ballet The Ragtime Dance, published in 1902 after an initial 1899 version, which integrated syncopated ragtime rhythms with choreographed dance sequences under Joplin's own directions.[3] This work demonstrated his ambition to apply ragtime's structural devices—such as its characteristic bass and melodic syncopation—to narrative-driven performance, laying groundwork for the operatic fusion in Treemonisha.[16] Joplin advanced this trajectory with A Guest of Honor, a two-act ragtime opera completed in 1903, which dramatized the 1901 White House dinner between President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, emphasizing themes of African American leadership and social integration.[8] Although the score was lost after brief performances, contemporary accounts confirm its use of ragtime idioms within grand opera conventions, prefiguring Treemonisha's blend of vernacular rhythms and elevated storytelling.[9] This earlier opera represented Joplin's initial shift from commercial piano rags, like his 1899 hit Maple Leaf Rag, toward didactic narratives promoting moral and communal uplift, a progression evident in Treemonisha's focus on education as a path to progress.[16] The opera further incorporated folk elements from African American spirituals and field hollers, rooted in Joplin's ragtime heritage and his advocacy for the genre's cultural legitimacy as outlined in the 1908 School of Ragtime.[17] In this instructional text, Joplin defended ragtime against dismissal as mere novelty, arguing its permanence and potential for serious expression—a philosophy that informed Treemonisha's evolution from short-form entertainment to a comprehensive work fusing opera with vernacular traditions for instructive purposes.[18] Recurring motifs of community guidance, as in the leadership archetype of Washington in A Guest of Honor, parallel Treemonisha's narrative thrust without replicating plot specifics.[16]Libretto and Narrative
Sources of Inspiration
The libretto of Treemonisha incorporates elements from Scott Joplin's early life in the Texarkana area, which spans the Texas-Arkansas border, where he spent his formative years after his birth on November 24, 1868. The opera's setting in rural Arkansas near Rondo in Miller County, dated September 1884, evokes the post-Civil War communities of freed Black families navigating emancipation's aftermath, including persistent folk practices amid emerging emphasis on literacy and self-improvement. Joplin's own household, led by his mother Florence Givens Joplin—a freeborn woman who worked as a cleaner and laundress while teaching her children reading, violin, and banjo—mirrored the adoptive parents' commitment to fostering knowledge in an isolated rural environment characterized by limited formal schooling and reliance on oral traditions.[19][20] Joplin's second wife, Freddie Alexander, died on September 10, 1904, from complications of a cold just ten weeks after their September 1904 wedding, an event that coincided with his shift toward operatic composition. Some music historians have posited that this personal loss influenced the opera's motifs of parental surrogacy and communal uplift through education, viewing Treemonisha as a partial memorial where adoptive rearing symbolizes resilience against untimely separation, though Joplin never explicitly confirmed such parallels. He commenced drafting the work around 1907, amid documented late-19th-century Black educational initiatives, such as those promoted by the Freedmen's Bureau and local churches, which countered rural superstitions rooted in African-derived conjure practices with Western-style learning—dynamics empirically observed in Southern Black enclaves where migration remained limited and communities grappled with economic stagnation and cultural syncretism.[21][11]Plot Synopsis
Act 1The opera is set in a rural Arkansas community of former slaves in September 1884.[22] Zodzetrick, a conjurer, attempts to sell Monisha a "bag of luck," but her husband Ned intervenes and drives him away.[23] Ned recounts how, years earlier, a bird delivered an infant girl—later named Treemonisha after the sacred tree beneath which she was found—to him and Monisha, who raised her as their own.[1] Ned taught Treemonisha to read and write, and she emerges with her friend Remus to urge the superstitious community to pursue education to resist exploitation by conjurers.[2] The villagers, fearing change, reject her message. Zodzetrick returns with associates, conjures a ghostly apparition to instill fear, and they abduct Treemonisha amid the chaos.[22] Act 2
Zodzetrick's followers, including Simon, Luddud, and Cephus, celebrate their influence through superstition while holding Treemonisha captive.[24] Remus disguises himself as a devil figure to terrify the conjurers into releasing her.[2] The pair flees to a nearby plantation, where field workers assist their escape, revealing community divisions between those clinging to old beliefs and those open to enlightenment.[2] Treemonisha resists the conjurers' attempts to induct her, leading them to abandon her in a forest clearing; Remus locates and rescues her, returning her toward home.[23] Act 3
Treemonisha reunites with Ned and Monisha as the community gathers. Remus and Treemonisha capture two conjurers, prompting calls for punishment, but Treemonisha pleads for forgiveness to foster unity.[2] Recognizing her wisdom and advocacy for knowledge over superstition, the villagers elect her as their leader. The opera concludes with a communal march celebrating education and progress.[1][23]