Scott Joplin's Last Work: The Opera Nobody Heard

Scott Joplin was the most celebrated composer in America for about a decade, from the publication of Maple Leaf Rag in eighteen ninety-nine through the early nineteen hundreds. The ragtime he formalized, with its syncopated left hand and its disciplined melodic right, became a national fever. It sold sheet music the way streaming sells plays now. Joplin took the royalties and spent the next fifteen years working on a problem nobody had asked him to solve: a full-scale opera for Black performers about Black American life. He called it Treemonisha.

He spent his own money producing it. He moved to New York. He badgered publishers and theater owners. In nineteen fifteen, he arranged a single run-through in a Harlem hall: no costumes, no sets, no orchestra. Just Joplin himself at the piano, playing all the parts and singing to demonstrate what the work could be. The audience did not understand it, or did not respond to what they understood. Joplin's health was already failing by then.

He died on April first, nineteen seventeen, at the Manhattan State Hospital in New York, of complications attributed to advanced syphilis. The medical term used at the time was dementia paralytica. He was approximately forty-eight years old. He did not know whether Treemonisha would ever be performed.

It received its first full professional production in nineteen seventy-two, fifty-five years after his death, in Atlanta. The same year Pruitt-Igoe was being demolished in north St. Louis. In nineteen seventy-six, Joplin received the Pulitzer Prize for music. The recognition arrived sixty years late.