Music: Scott Joplin: From Rags to Opera

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This production accepts Treemonisha's old-fashioned charm and innocence without embarrassment. Says Schuller, an expert on ragtime and jazz: "There are certain kinds of primitive art works that must be preserved as they originally were. Treemonisha is one of them. It just won't work if you try to sass it up or modernize it for Broadway." This is easier said than done, especially in scoring the work; only Joplin's piano edition has survived. Schuller's orchestration radiates not just the ring of authenticity but the growl and wail as well.

Corsaro, a veteran director of Broadway and opera, has given Treemonisha a dreamy, timeless feel that softens its awkward edges and enlarges its fable. He and Designer Franco Colavecchia have conceived sets that underline that aura of make-believe. The plantation cabins, for example, are shells that are held up on poles by supers. The rainbow that greets Treemonisha's ascendancy to leadership is an arch of ribbons. Dancers with alligator and bear masks move in and out of the voodoo scene. Louis Johnson's choreography does have a touch of Broadway pizazz. But when those good plantation folks turn from corn husking to "goin' around" (square dancing), it is hard to believe that anything so bouncy could have been rehearsed, let alone laid out in advance. The performance benefits enormously from the authority of Betty Allen's Monisha and Willard White's Ned, not to mention Schuller's buoyant conducting. But it is Carmen Balthrop as Treemonisha who is easily the hit of the evening. Winner of the 1975 Metropolitan Opera auditions, she still moves too cautiously on stage, but her lyric soprano voice has an appealing woodwind glow and she uses it with authority.

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It was not enough that the sheet music of Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold more than a million copies and made the son of a former slave well-to-do almost overnight. Not for Scott Joplin. As a youth he may have earned his living playing honky-tonk piano by night in a string of saloons and bordellos in the South and Midwest. But what few realized was that he was expertly tutored in harmony, counterpoint and the works of the classical masters.

Joplin's musical genius was enormous and precocious. He was born in 1868 at Texarkana into a family that took music as its birthright. The father, a laborer, played the violin; the mother sang and picked banjo. Joplin started out on the guitar and bugle, but at age seven discovered the piano and was soon teaching himself to improvise.

After his mother's death, and one argument too many with his father about learning a trade, the boy left home for good at age 14 to become a honky-tonk pianist. It was the only trade he cared about. No doubt Joplin could play "ragged time," as it was first called because of its bouncing bass and syncopated right hand, as bumptiously as the next man. But by the time he began writing his rags down in the late 1890s, they had obviously become objects of care, even personal meaning for him.