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OPERA IN RAGGED TIMES  
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Larry Wolff
May 16, 2026
The New York Review of Books
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_ Scott Joplin’s luminous musical parable on the evils of ignorance
is uncannily attuned to the present moment. _

A scene from the Washington National Opera’s production of
Treemonisha, 2026, Elman Studio

 

During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency,
while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and
shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also
found the time to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—the first time a
president has ever assumed that position. Trump’s newly chosen board
of directors probably have no legal authority over the name of the
center, which was declared by Congress in 1964 to be a memorial to
JFK. But on December 18, 2025, they voted anyway to rename the
institution as The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial
Center for the Performing Arts and added the new designation to the
exterior of the building. The living president has thus claimed the
Center as a memorial to himself.    

On January 9, 2026, the Washington National Opera, which has been
performing at the Center for decades, announced that it would be
departing immediately. And yet it still managed to mount its next
planned performance—a new production of Scott Joplin’s
_Treemonisha_ directed by the renowned, now retired mezzo-soprano and
D.C. native Denyce Graves—on schedule, the weekend of March 7 and 8,
at the Lisner Auditorium of George Washington University. A logistical
near-miracle, the production was also an artistic triumph and a
political vindication. Joplin’s luminous musical parable on the
evils of ignorance and superstition, on redemption through education
and enlightenment, is uncannily attuned to the present moment.

Joplin copyrighted and published the piano-vocal score of
_Treemonisha_ in 1911 and spent the rest of his life—until his early
death in 1917, at forty-eight—trying and failing to set up a
performance of what he considered the culmination of his life’s
work. He had been famous since 1899, when he composed the piano piece
“Maple Leaf Rag” while living in Sedalia, Missouri. With their
characteristic syncopated, “ragged” rhythms, Joplin’s
compositions did much to popularize the ragtime style that originated
in the Black community but crossed racial boundaries even in a period
of pervasive segregation and discrimination.

Associated at the time with minstrel shows and cakewalk dancing,
ragtime was hardly thought compatible with elite European classical
forms. Black vaudeville ensembles added the words “opera” or
“operatic” to their company names almost ironically, relishing the
seeming incongruity. In 1902 the singer and columnist Sylvester
Russell wrote in the _Indianapolis Freeman_ that “there is no such
thing as rag-time opera.” Joplin was less dogmatic, and when he
composed _Treemonisha_ he made ragtime just one element in a score
that was also shaped by European classical style. “I have used
syncopations (rhythm) peculiar to my race,” he was quoted as saying
in the African American newspaper _The New York Age_ in 1913, “but
the music is not ragtime and the score complete is grand opera.”

Justin Austin as Remus and Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha in the
Washington National Opera’s production of _Treemonisha_, 2026 Elman
Studio

It was grand opera with a notable kinship to operetta and popular
music, but 1911 was a year when grand opera was reinventing itself in
new and modernist forms: the year of the premiere of Richard
Strauss’s _Der Rosenkavalier_ and the composition of Béla
Bartók’s _Bluebeard’s Castle_. Even in this innovative moment,
however, Joplin’s work was a unique experiment. It was not just the
first major opera composed by a Black American but arguably the first
truly American opera in its musical sources and styles, integrating
the old European conventions—arias and choruses, bel canto
ornamentations and climactic high notes—with diverse aspects of
Black American musical culture, including ragtime rhythm, a gospel
chorus, and a barbershop quartet. The overture in B-flat major, marked
_Allegretto_ (all the score markings are Italian by convention),
introduces ragtime syncopation before shifting to _Largo con
espressione_ and then _Adagio_.

_The American Musician and Art Journal _took an interest early on,
reporting already in 1907 that “Scott Joplin has been working a
considerable time on a grand opera which will contain music similar to
that sung by the negroes during slavery days, the music of today, the
negro ragtime, and the music that the negro will use in the future.”
In 1911, when it was possible to review the score (though not to see
the opera), the same journal paid tribute to _Treemonisha_ as “a
thoroughly American opera, dealing with a typical American
subject”—a Black community of formerly enslaved men and women in
the mid-1880s, facing the dangers of exploitation and violence that
still menaced them as they aspired to the full dimensions of
emancipation. For the _Journal_, this was nothing less than a new kind
of opera: “To date there is no record of even the slightest tendency
toward the fashioning of the real American opera, and although this
work just completed by one of the Ethiopian race will hardly be
accepted as typical American opera for obvious reasons, nevertheless
none can deny that it serves as an opening wedge, since it is in every
respect indigenous.”

Joplin died, impoverished and suffering from the dementia of tertiary
syphilis, at Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island in the East
River. He never saw a staged performance of _Treemonisha_, and his
ragtime celebrity was about to be eclipsed by—or perhaps absorbed
into—the spirit of the coming Jazz Age. In his final years he was
convinced that Irving Berlin had copied elements of _Treemonisha_’s
spectacular concluding musical and dance number, “A Real Slow
Drag,” to make a hit out of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in
1911.

Berlin was still alive when Joplin returned to posthumous celebrity in
the 1970s, beginning with Joshua Rifkin’s LP of “Scott Joplin
Piano Rags,” the publication of Joplin’s collected works by the
pianist-musicologist Vera Brodsky Lawrence, and a concert at the
Lincoln Center Library that included excerpts from _Treemonisha_. In
1972 the opera had its long-delayed premiere at Morehouse College in
Atlanta, followed by a larger production at Houston Opera in 1975 that
helped Joplin win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize the next year. The
success of the 1973 Oscar-winning film _The Sting_, which put
Joplin’s irresistible 1902 ragtime number “The Entertainer” on
the Billboard charts, further secured his new acclaim. _Treemonisha_,
however, never established itself as a standard in the operatic
repertory, and this year’s Washington production is the latest to
make a powerful case for this strange, beautiful, pioneering, and
still neglected work.

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The practical problem with producing _Treemonisha_ is that it remains,
in some sense, incomplete. Because the opera was never staged in
Joplin’s lifetime (he organized and played the piano for one concert
performance in Harlem), there was no published orchestral score, and
though we know that Joplin worked on an orchestration, whatever he
managed to complete has been lost. When the opera finally had its
posthumous premiere in Atlanta, the composer Thomas Jefferson Anderson
composed an orchestration around the piano-vocal score from 1911. A
few years later the “Third Stream” composer Gunther Schuller,
noted for combining jazz and classical idioms, orchestrated
_Treemonisha_ for the Houston Opera on a lusher, larger scale. 

In Washington the challenge was taken on by the pianist and composer
Damien Sneed, who lightly orchestrated the score for twenty musicians,
under the baton of Kedrick Armstrong, adjusting to the restricted size
of the Lisner orchestra pit. Sneed notes in the program that this is
his “second adaptation” of the score, having done a first version
for St. Louis in 2023. He attributes his interest in Joplin’s
underestimated masterwork to the late, legendary soprano Jessye
Norman, whom he sometimes accompanied at the piano (and who herself
sang “A Real Slow Drag” for Queen Elizabeth at the royal birthday
concert in London in 1986). Norman was passionate about Joplin, as
Sneed recalled: “She urged me—almost pleaded with me—to promise
that I would devote myself to _Treemonisha_, no matter what obstacles
arose. That charge became sacred to me.”

Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha in the Washington National Opera’s
production of _Treemonisha_, 2026 Elman Studio

The fate of the opera _Treemonisha_—orphaned at a young age and
taken up by adoptive stewards—is not unlike that of its eponymous
heroine. She is a Black foundling, discovered under a “sacred
tree” and adopted by a couple from the Texarkana region, where
Joplin himself was born in 1868, just after emancipation. (His father
worked on the railroad, one possible source for the glorious
_Treemonisha_ chorus of “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn.”) Having
been taught to read and write as the protégé of a white benefactor,
the teenage Treemonisha preaches the importance of education as a way
to rise in the world, somewhat in the spirit of Booker T.
Washington—whom Joplin admired, and about whom he had attempted to
write an earlier opera, _A Guest of Honor_, which is now completely
lost. When Treemonisha denounces the local “conjurers” for
exploiting superstition to sell lucky charms and magic dust, they
kidnap her and threaten her with a wasp’s nest, until her friend
Remus arrives to rescue her.

In the ensemble finale she leads the community in “A Real Slow
Drag,” a number that perhaps represents the slow path toward
progress and equality. Marked _Larghetto_—an unhurried tempo
uncharacteristic for ragtime—the “marching onward, marching
onward” refrain has Treemonisha harmonizing in thirds with a second
soprano in the key of F and making a thrilling octave leap to high A
from measure to measure, maintaining an elegant ragtime syncopation in
the leisurely tempo. Onstage, according to the libretto, the company
“all march, doing the dude walk.” Joplin did provide detailed
instructions for the dance steps, brilliantly realized in Washington
by the choreographer Eboni Adams as the slow drag built to a hypnotic
climax. The stage set, designed by Lawrence E. Moten III, offered a
gorgeous backdrop of folk floral design in art nouveau patterns.

The opera’s story borrows from the forms and styles of the folktale,
which, as the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar note in
_The Annotated African American Folktales_ (2018), were being
rediscovered by adventurous young collectors in the Virginia circle of
the Hampton Folklore Society just as Joplin was coming of age as a
composer in the 1890s. (A fuller academic appreciation of Black
folklore would come later in the 1920s and 1930s with the pioneering
anthropological research of Zora Neale Hurston.) And yet the opera has
a vexed relationship to the African American folk tradition on which
it draws. Gates observes that “a certain segment of the African
American community saw Negro folklore, like dialect, as a discursive
remnant of slavery” and therefore “a cultural and social
embarrassment,” along with cultural forms “like spirituals, like
ragtime and the blues, like work songs.” As a ragtime composer,
Joplin belonged to this turn-of-the-century folkloric moment, but he
also shared a version of this ambivalence, which can be seen in the
opera’s treatment of the conjurers. Historically, these figures
would have practiced traditional forms of magic with roots in a range
of African religions and in cultural traditions preserved from the
days of slavery. Yet they are also the opera’s villains, denounced
by Treemonisha as agents of superstition.

Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes as the
conjurer Zodzetrick in the Washington National Opera’s production of
_Treemonisha_, 2026 Elman Studio

Denyce Graves, the most celebrated Carmen of her generation—she made
her Met debut in the role in 1995—knows well that superstitions,
like Carmen’s clairvoyant reading of the cards, can be integral to
the operatic form. Consistent with Tatar’s observation that African
American folktales, once dismissed as “signs of ignorance,” in
fact “constituted a significant part of the nation’s collective
cultural heritage,” Graves has given us a production that gracefully
celebrates the opera’s folkloric aspects and softens Joplin’s
satirical assault on ignorance and superstition. The conjurers, shown
as contrite in the end, are forgiven and fully reintegrated into the
Texarkana community. Meanwhile the Christian “Parson Alltalk,” who
was probably intended to appear as another figure of useless and even
comical superstition (“all talk”), is instead endowed with
spiritual sincerity and solemnity by emphasizing the musical emotion
of his gospel preaching and the community’s choral response.

Sneed acknowledges in the program note that “_Treemonisha_ is not
simply a ragtime opera.” But he also has a keen awareness that
ragtime belongs to the folk texture of the work, and he uses passages
of ragtime from the piano-vocal score to stitch together the opera’s
scenes. At the performances Sneed played the piano himself on the side
of the stage, alongside the banjo player DeAnte Haggerty-Willis (and
apart from the rest of the orchestra below in the pit). It was almost
as if the pianist and banjoist belonged to the fictive stage
community, as if the making of communal folk music was itself part of
the opera’s subject.

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Graves drew splendid performances from her cast, starting with the
marvelous young Oklahoma-born soprano Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha.
Bound and tethered by the conjurers, she sings a waltz-time soprano
aria that looks back to the musical world of the 1890s, with echoes of
the minstrel show sensation “After the Ball.” Goodwin delivered
the number with lovely pathos and impassioned lyricism, accompanied
elegantly by Sneed on piano. Remus, who in this production not only
rescues her but marries her in the end, was designated as a tenor by
Joplin but warmly sung in Washington by the baritone Justin Austin,
harmonizing with Goodwin in a humming refrain that anticipated “A
Real Slow Drag.” There were also superb performances from the two
singers playing Treemonisha’s adoptive parents, the mezzo-soprano
Tichina Vaughn and the bass-baritone Kevin Short. In the final act
Short sings with vocally dark intensity about confronting moral peril:
“When villains ramble far and near/To break the people’s laws.”

Kevin Short as Ned and Tichina Vaughn as Monisha in the Washington
National Opera’s production of _Treemonisha_, 2026 Elman Studio

The solemn low D that concludes “When Villains Ramble” puts one in
mind of Sarastro, the temple leader in Mozart’s _Magic Flute_, a
notable precedent for _Treemonisha_ in the operatic repertory. As a
boy in Texarkana, Joplin was given free piano lessons by a German
Jewish immigrant named Julius Weiss, who introduced the young musician
to European classical music. When _The American Musician and Art
Journal_ reported on Joplin’s ragtime pieces in 1907, it noted that
“he is delighted with Beethoven and Bach, and his compositions,
though syncopated, smack of the higher cult.” Four years later the
journal, evaluating the score of _Treemonisha_, compared Joplin to the
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, who also drew on Black spiritual
music and American folk rhythms for the New World Symphony (1893). One
might even consider _Treemonisha_ in relation to Bedřich Smetana’s
_The Bartered Bride_, which uses folkloric musical forms to animate a
comedy of peasant village life. Composed in the 1860s, Smetana’s
Czech folk opera had its first US performance at the Chicago World’s
Fair in 1893, where Joplin was also present for musical performances
of his own: it was probably here that ragtime music first found a
broad public.

_The Magic Flute_, with its fairy-tale scenario, its struggle between
good and evil, its triumphant temple of virtue, and its integration of
popular entertainment with high classical art, is especially relevant
for understanding Joplin’s operatic purposes. Like Mozart’s opera,
which explicitly denounces the superstition (_Aberglaube_) of the
Queen of the Night, _Treemonisha_ rallies its company and audience to
advance together toward enlightenment. The climactic choral
celebration of Treemonisha as the community’s new leader recalls the
ascension of Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s temple finale, but
Joplin, with radical flair, omits the Tamino figure. When Treemonisha
asks “Who will lead the men?” the chorus assures her that she will
lead men and women alike—a line that drew applause in Washington.

Lisner Auditorium, which was completed in 1946, actually looks like an
Art Deco temple, with its austere neoclassicism and its right-angle
columns marking out a geometrical triple entrance to the building’s
limestone cubic structure. It was also the site of early struggles
over desegregation in Washington, D.C., when George Washington
University initially refused to admit Black theatergoers and Ingrid
Bergman, performing there in 1946, joined in the protest. It was at
Lisner, now integrated, that the Washington National Opera was
launched in 1957, with Mozart’s _Abduction from the Seraglio_,
another opera about rescue from captivity. At the conclusion of
_Treemonisha_, when the chorus acclaims the rescued heroine as their
new leader, she sings in response: “There’s need of some good
leader/And there’s not much time to wait.” The ensuing finale
offers, with the building intensity of the syncopated ragtime march, a
hopeful rallying rhythm for the challenges still ahead.

THE WASHINGTON NATIONAL OPERA
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WAS AT LISNER AUDITORIUM AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ON MARCH 7,
8, AND 15.

_LARRY WOLFF is the Silver Professor of European History at NYU and
the author, most recently, of The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale
Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy. (February 2024)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW was launched during the New York City newspaper
strike of 1963, when the magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication—one
in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time
could write about current books and issues in depth. _

_Readers responded by buying almost every copy and writing thousands
of letters to demand that the Review continue. From the beginning,
the editors were determined that the Review should be an independent
publication; it began life as an editorial voice beholden to no one,
and it remains so today._

_Subscribe to the New York Review of Books_
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* opera
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* Scott Joplin
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* Ragtime
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* Music
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* Washington National Opera
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* Kennedy Center
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* Treemonisha
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