See America First - The Black South, Part 1
Director Frank Corsaro, commenting upon the Houston Grand Opera 1975 production -- and first professional staging -- of Scott Joplin's 1911 opera Treemonisha, wrote, "The music is a crazy quilt of Handel, von Weber and Negro folk materials, all stitched together with show-biz savvy circa 1910." However, as regarded its theme, he continued, "The opera emerges as a sort of Magic Flute," playfully calling both works "spiritual vaudevilles." Especially given the unfortunate circumstances that prevented Gershwin from ever hearing a note of Joplin's operas in his lifetime, it is very interesting to compare Treemonisha with the 1935 Porgy and Bess -- composed by a white man aspiring to capture the black musical idiom within his own experience what vaudeville and Broadway had become post-Joplin.
Note I said Joplin's operas, for he in fact composed at least two that we know about. The first, A Guest of Honor, was performed in 1903, but it was never published and it is believed that Joplin himself destroyed its score, along with some other works. However, sometime within that same decade of the twentieth century, he began work on Treemonisha, whose score he personally published in 1911. However, aside from an audition for an unrealized production, at which singers sang sections of it informally, it was not performed in his lifetime. He died in 1917, and the opera fell into complete obscurity until the great Joplin revival of the early 1970s, when his rags were published and recorded, and the score for Treemonisha was researched and roused from its long sleep. It was given in a semiprofessional performance at Wolf Trap in 1973, and then moved to Houston, where that latter cast was recorded.
I was fortunate to have attended the Broadway run of that production, and also a subsequent and far flatter, scholarly staging at Town Hall in the early 90s when, alas, the opera had taken on what seems to be its prevailing air of something of an embarrassingly naif, non-P.C. museum piece, mostly because of its heavily dialectal lyrics and the simplicity of what they express.
It is clear from Joplin's own command of written English and, most importantly with regard to his own libretto for Treemonisha, that he was striving to replicate the language he himself had been exposed to in the very community in which he himself had grown up (Texarkana, Arkansas). The title character, the only member of the cast to have been formally educated, as well as her parents, Monisha and Ned, whom her education has naturally influenced, express themselves in correctly spelled, grammatical English. At the end of the opera, when the chorus of their neighbors repeat Treemonisha's words, they echo her to literally the letter. This is perhaps a subtle point to catch in performance heard but not read, but it is vital to one's understanding of the opera, as we shall see.
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