The History of Jazz Read Online Free PDF

and showmanship at the expense of melodic beauty. Hence the well-known admonition that graces many of his published compositions: “note: Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.”
    The most controversial result of Joplin’s high-flung aspirations was his opera Treemonisha , often misleadingly referred to as a “ragtime opera,” but which has very little ragtime in it. Instead it probes deeply into the pre-rag folk roots of black American music, as well as taps the full range of European operatic devices—the work comes complete with orchestration, overture, recitatives, arias, and ensembles. The last years of Joplin’s life found him increasingly preoccupied with this project. It made enormous demands on the composer, not only because of the massive scale of the work, but perhaps even more from the considerable challenge of finding financial and public support for the undertaking. Around 1903, Joplin had written a first opera, now lost, titled A Guest of Honor , which apparently kept fairly close to the ragtime style. Treemonisha proved to be a far more expansive and consuming musical project.
    As early as 1907, Joplin may have discussed the new opera with Eubie Blake, and the following year he played parts of it for Joseph Lamb. John Stark turned down the work, sensing the poor commercial prospects for an African American folk opera, and it was not until 1911 that Joplin, financing the venture himself, was able to publish the 230-page score for piano and eleven voices. His single-minded focus on the opera forced Joplin to ignore more lucrative publishing opportunities—the year before the release of the piano score, only one other Joplin rag appeared in print— causing financial difficulties for the composer and precipitating a break with Stark. Undeterred, Joplin proceeded with the daunting tasks of orchestrating the lengthy work and seeking financial backing for a full-scale production. On completing the orchestration, Joplin began auditioning singers, determined to stage the opera at his own expense to test the public response. A single performance took place, in 1915 in a Harlem hall, with an underrehearsed cast, no scenery or costumes, and without an orchestra—merely the composer playing the piano score. The work, staged in such an austere manner, generated little enthusiasm at the time among a Harlem audience more interested in assimilating established artistic traditions than in celebrating the roots of African American culture.
    In the fall of 1916, a year after the disastrous performance of Treemonisha , Joplin was committed to the Manhattan State Hospital. On April 1, 1917, Joplin died from “dementia paralytica-cerebral,” brought on by syphilis. Although he had not yet reached his fiftieth birthday, Joplin had already outlived his fame. The ragtime craze in America had passed, and Joplin’s popularity had waned to such an extent that a number of his unpublished compositions remained hidden away in the Stark company files and were eventually destroyed when the operation moved in 1935. Other compositions—which may have included a piano concerto—came into the hands of Wilbur Sweatman, who was executor of Joplin’s widow’s estate, but they too have disappeared. The various books on African American music written in the decades following the composer’s death devoted little or no space to Joplin, and it was not until Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis published their seminal work They All Played Ragtime in 1950 that Joplin’s extraordinary career began to be understood in any degree of perspective. And it took the surprising and unprecedented ragtime resurgence of the 1970s before Joplin’s works took the next step and moved beyond the confines of scholars and specialists to reenter the mainstream of American culture. In the mid-1970s, Joplin’s popularity, and the sales of recordings of his music, matched rock-star levels; one piece, “The Entertainer,” even became