At last, almost four decades since the release of Gunther Schuller’s Broadway “original cast” recording of Scott Joplin’s nearly lost ragtime opera, Treemonisha, comes a painstakingly researched, long-contemplated alternative. So different is Rick Benjamin’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and Singers’ reconstruction of that opera that it raises the question: Would Joplin have posthumously received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in music had this version, rather than Schuller’s, made its belated premiere on the Big White Way?
Before discussing New World Records’ new CD, some historical background is in order. In 1916, one year before Joplin died of syphilis around the time of his 50th birthday, he completed what the Age termed his “music comedy drama.” While Benjamin’s astoundingly detailed research — beautifully presented in the costly, profusely illustrated 113-page booklet that distinguishes this “hardbound” release — suggests that more than one performance of the opera took place early on, it has only survived in a piano-vocal version. (Benjamin’s essay recounts the painful tale of the destruction of what may have been Joplin’s original orchestration.) Ignored, Treemonisha languished until 1970, when Joshua Rifkin’s first of three ragtime albums for Nonesuch brought Joplin’s gifts to light.
Listen To The Music
Treemonisha: Act 1, OvertureTreemonisha: Act 2, Frolic of the Bears
In 1972, T.J. Anderson’s new orchestration of the opera received a joint production by the music department of Morehouse College and the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Shaw and directed by dance great Katherine Dunham. Schuller’s orchestration and Broadway production featured a distinguished African-American cast (with Carmen Balthrop, Betty Allen, and Willard White among them) and a full-blown orchestra. Well-recorded in a large, resonant venue, it’s big and lively, with a superstition-spreading Zodzetrick (Ben Harney) who sounds for all the world like Sportin’ Life in the Gershwin brothers’ Porgy and Bess. Other accents are a mishmash, with Porgy-like Southern Negro dialect interspersed with European-influenced operatic English.
Benjamin throws all that out the window. In its place comes what he believes to be as close to an authentic reconstruction as we are able to achieve in the absence of Joplin’s orchestration. Recorded in a smaller, drier acoustic, the 11-piece Paragon Ragtime Orchestra plays one-to-a part. Gone is Schuller’s grand scale, including the instruments -- oboes, bassoons, French horns, tuba, and harp – that Benjamin believes Joplin could not have called upon for his production(s).
Doing the vocal honors are operatically trained African-American singers whose credits include major opera companies here and abroad, but whose accents are uniform and presumably authentic. While Broadway’s “darkie dialect” added a lot of color and life to Schuller’s performance, Benjamin’s milder version of turn-of-the-century Southern Negro dialect is less stereotypically condescending. At the recording’s end comes a most touching bonus, as Joplin’s closest living relative, a grandniece, LaErma White of Texarkana, Arkansas, reads Joplin’s own Preface/Synopsis.
As indispensible as Benjamin’s recording may be, is it looking a gift horse in the mouth to state that some of his singers are either past their prime or less vocally distinguished than Schuller’s, and that the playing too often drags and sounds simplistic? After all, Joplin’s early music training in Texarkana came via numerous routes: the church, his musically gifted family, and a German scholar, Julius White. Later in his life, Joplin came under the spell of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Even though Treemonisha’s plot reeks of melodrama, and its music is a historically invaluable amalgam of genuine African-American melodies, ragtime, and vaudeville/music hall minstrel, I wonder whether Joplin’s ideal performance — as opposed to the best that he as an oppressed African-American could possibly have achieved in a racially unenlightened age — would have sounded as naive and dramatically inconsequential as this.