There is a tragic side to Joplin's only surviving opera, Treemonisha, in spite of its sparkling tunes and, partly, ragtime rhythms. He spent the last years of his life obsessed with getting the opera staged and his experience of rejection led to his decline and early death. Fortunately he published the vocal score at his own expense in 1911. Even though the run-through performance in 1915 was a flop, this printed score enabled Gunther Schuller to orchestrate the work and obtain recognition for Joplin as more than just a composer of rags, excellent though those classics are, through the Houston Grand Opera production in 1975.
It is impossible to imagine anyone better qualified than Schuller to bring Treemonisha back to life. His orchestrations show complete sympathy and idiomatic expertise, even if some decisions may still raise queries. For example, ''Aunt Dinah has blowed de horn'' (track 17), is marked Assai moderato con espressione but Schuller really dashes it off against all Joplin's instructions elsewhere about his rags. One can see why—the opera is starved of events and some of the straightforward narration quickly palls. Treemonisha, to Joplin's own libretto, urges education as the solution to the downtrodden Blacks' predicament. Lacking this benefit himself, Joplin could not command the theatrical skills and experience needed to make his story more than a naive curiosity—as the stage production by the Bromley Festival Opera Company, under Gregory Rose's direction, showed in 1990. But this matters far less in a recording where mellifluous arias in the mainstream nineteenth-century Italian tradition make their effect interspersed with delightful Americanisms—the barber-shop group in ''We will rest awhile'' (track 6 on the second CD) and the fully-fledged delicate rag which forms the Prelude to Act 3 (track 10). Above all, perhaps, the ''Real Slow Drag'' at the end.
The cast is well balanced and convincing—interesting to hear Willard White, as Ned, well before his later triumphs—the recording, showing its age slightly, is adequate and the whole production much to be welcomed on to Compact Disc.'