From Rags to Rags

Everybody knows what ragtime is: piano players in striped shirts and sleeve garters sitting under Tiffany lamps and slapping battered upright pianos that sound as if they had been dipped in water and set out in the sun to bake. Grand opera it is not.

But wait. It is opera, or can be. Back in 1911, Scott Joplin, the self-styled King of Ragtime, composed an opera called Treemonisha. It was one of the few early attempts at an opera by an American black composer, and it drew intriguingly on the musical comedy styles of the day, including ragtime. Neither distinction was enough to get it produced. For 60 years the work gathered dust on library shelves. Last week, at Atlanta's Memorial Arts Center, Treemonisha finally made it to the stage. It turned out to be of far more than historical interest. Despite its naivete, the opera brims with jubilant rhythms and haunting melodies.

Joplin's libretto has a big subject (how the Negro can improve himself) but an oversimplified solution (education). Its language is embarrassingly laden with darky dialect ("Aunt Dinah has blowed de horn,/And we'll go home to stay until dawn"). There are enough voodoo heavies, cavorting bears and right-thinking preachers to tax any producer's ingenuity.

In Atlanta, Director Katherine Dunham treated Treemonisha as the period piece it is but did little more than use it as a frame for big dance scenes. These had a scalp-tingling power. The gorgeous A Real Slow Drag ended the opera with a ceremonious eroticism that nearly matched Joplin's music. Alpha Floyd, in the title role of a foundling whose book learning propels her into civic leadership, produced a bright, reedy soprano but had stiff presence. Simon Estes, as Treemonisha's father Ned, draped Joplin's curvaceous melodies in rolling voluminous sound. But with surprisingly lackluster support from Conductor Robert Shaw, Treemonisha's effect was blander than the score deserved.

Still, it was a far cry from the only hearing that Treemonisha received during Joplin's lifetime--a run-through in a Harlem rehearsal hall. The black listeners in the hall did not like it. Ragtime Scholar Rudi Blesh speculates that they "were sophisticated enough to reject their folk past, but not sufficiently to relish a return to it in art." The composer was forced to publish the work at his own expense.

Torn Cloth. To Joplin, who was obsessed with opera, Treemonisha's failure meant the failure of his whole life. Born in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas, the son of an ex-slave, Joplin discovered the piano at age seven. His self-taught playing and improvising attracted so much attention that a local piano teacher waived his usual fees and took the prodigy in hand. After Joplin's mother died, the youngster had a falling out with his father and at 14 left home to take up the life of a honky-tonk pianist. He wandered to St. Louis, Chicago, and finally in 1894 to Sedalia, Mo., picking up work mostly in brothels and lowlife clubs.

The piano style of the day had developed a bouncing, thump-pah bass and an ornate, syncopated melodic line. Because it sounded as ragged as a torn cloth, it was called "ragged time," then "ragtime." Its effect was intoxicating, and it spread rapidly into theaters, dance halls and--via sheet music and piano rolls--homes through the country. Joplin, playing in the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, produced an infectious example which he named the Maple Leaf Rag. After showing it to a publisher, he announced firmly: "The Maple Leaf will make me the king of ragtime composers."

It did. The piece sold 75,000 copies of sheet music in six months and eventually topped the million mark. Having become wealthy by the standards of the time, the quiet and serious Joplin welcomed the chance to give up performing. He moved back to St. Louis and devoted himself to teaching and composing.

Sheer Joy. In the hands of authentic practitioners like Joplin, the rag was a disciplined form capable of astonishing variety and subtlety. Usually it had four 16-measure themes, and like a rondo it habitually reprised its first theme immediately after the introduction of each succeeding one. Joplin did for the rag what Chopin did for the mazurka. His style ranged from the tonally tormented Euphonic Sounds, to Solace, a stunningly wrought serenade that incorporates the bolero and the tango. For sheer tumultuous joy, Scott Joplin's New Rag holds its own with any comic finale of Rossini's.

While turning out rags, Joplin clung to the dream of producing an opera. In 1907 he went to New York and threw himself into Treemonisha. After the Harlem debacle in 1915, he became morose. His mind deteriorated, and in 1916 he was committed to Manhattan State Hospital, where he died the following year of a neurological complication of syphilis; the disease was a hazard of the occupation that had made him famous.

Ragtime collapsed of other causes: overexposure and the rise of jazz. It began to stir again fitfully around 1950, when Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis published They All Played Ragtime, a definitive history of Joplin's era. Ragtime clubs sprang up. Pianist-Composer Eubie Blake, a near contemporary of Joplin's, regained some of his old fame. Entertainer Max Morath played and discussed rags on stage and TV. In 1970 Nonesuch Records began issuing LPs on which rags were played by such "legitimate" pianists as Joshua Rifkin and William Bolcolm.

Around the same time, an ex-concert pianist named Vera Brodsky Lawrence learned about Joplin from Bolcolm and set about collecting his music. She gathered Treemonisha and all the piano music except three rags, on which an uncooperative publisher refused to yield the rights. Her two-volume set is scheduled for publication by the New York Public Library later this month--a fitting, long-overdue recognition of America's first notable black composer.

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