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Opera open thread: Treemonisha [1]

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Date: 2025-06-21

Sometimes you think that an “artificial intelligence” like ChatGPT should be able to come up with the answer to a given question, but it actually can’t, because the question has not been sufficiently researched by humans.

For example, I was wondering about the use of leitmotif technique in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha. I put the question to Google, and its A.I. gave an answer that looks superficially plausible. But when I read that answer carefully, it sounded like someone who didn’t know the answer but was trying very hard to give me the answer he thought I wanted to hear: that yes, Joplin did use leitmotif technique in his opera.

For comparison, I asked ChatGPT to list the five most frequently occurring leitmotifs in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. I’m not sure this answer is correct either, but if it’s not, it wouldn’t take too much effort to correct it. I am ready to debate for or against this answer.

Valhalla motif Alberich’s curse motif Power of the Ring motif Siegfried’s horn call Magic fire motif

Wagner’s Ring has been studied extensively, and scholars and listeners pretty much agree on how to refer to the various leitmotifs. We have a similar situation with John Williams’s scores for the nine Star Wars episodes. According to ChatGPT, the five most frequently used leitmotifs in those three trilogies are:

The Force theme Main title theme Imperial March Leia’s theme Rey’s theme

This answer I’m much more certain is correct, but, as with the Ring, if it’s not, it shouldn’t take much effort to correct it.

Scott Joplin

ChatGPT’s answer for the five most frequently leitmotifs in Treemonisha (1910), the only surviving opera by renowned ragtime composer Scott Joplin, is very plausible (the earlier A Guest of Honor is now considered completely lost). It makes sense that Treemonisha’s theme is the most frequently used leitmotif, as she’s the main character. But, as I’ve only listened to the whole opera once, I’m hardly qualified to endorse ChatGPT’s answer or argue it’s wrong.

Treemonisha has hardly ever been staged and performed. The entire Ring is usually played more in any single year than Treemonisha has been played in the past century. This year you don’t even have to make the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, you can go to Brattleboro, Vermont. Unsurprisingly, Joplin’s opera has not been analyzed by experts in music or drama to the extent that the Ring has been.

According to the article on Scott Joplin by Susan Curtis for the Missouri Encyclopedia,

Joplin was born on November 24, 1868, in Cass County, Texas, the second son of Jiles and Florence Joplin. During his early childhood, the Joplin family lived on a plantation owned by William Caves, but in the 1870s they moved to the recently founded town of Texarkana, where Jiles Joplin began working for the railroad. While in Texarkana, the younger Joplin learned how to play piano, partly through his own efforts on an instrument owned by one of his mother’s employers and partly through lessons from a German music teacher, Julius Weiss. His parents, both of whom were talented musicians, encouraged the boy, and eventually the family acquired a used square piano for his use.

Note for context that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the news finally reached Texas on June 19, 1868.

By the beginning of the 20th Century, Joplin was famous throughout America. But his first opera, A Guest of Honor (1903), despite newsworthy early performances, was a discouraging failure for reasons apart from the merits of the work.

But Joplin was not completely discouraged, and by 1910 he had completed Treemonisha and the next year published a vocal score at great expense to himself. Joplin’s original orchestration is now believed to be irretrievably lost.

Antonio Salieri (Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz) intrudes as a character in his own opera, Kublai Khan.

A few different composers have reconstructed the orchestration from the piano part, including Gunther Schuller, whose orchestration is what was used for the Deutsche Grammophon recording.

Composer Damien Sneed and librettist Karen Chilton went one step further than Schuller and added a prologue and an epilogue with Scott Joplin as a character in his own opera, sort of like Antonio Salieri in a recent reimagining of Kublai Khan (1788).

For a plot summary of Treemonisha, I turn to Gillian Reinhard writing for Opera Wire. I’m only quoting the summary for Act I, you can read the rest at the link. Treemonisha is

a young woman living in a forest between the composer’s hometown of Texarkana, Texas and the Red River of Arkansas. The piece begins with the community beginning their day of work with folk songs. Treemonisha finds herself under a sacred tree in the forest, a direct parallel to the enchanted tree of “Die Walkure.” Conjurers arrive to perform for the community and kidnap Treemonisha at the end of the first act. The magic and superstition of the conjurers throughout the opera are meant to directly contrast with the values of Treemonisha, who is literate and insists on learning and logic.

Ultimately, according to the Missouri Encyclopedia,

Treemonisha offered a celebration of literacy, learning, hard work, and community solidarity as the best formula for advancing the race. Treemonisha incorporated syncopation in many of the songs, but it would be inaccurate to characterize it as a ragtime opera. Joplin insisted it featured “strictly Negro” music and was grand opera, not ragtime. By 1911, when Joplin completed this opera, many music critics had denounced ragtime as vulgar, insubstantial music. Joplin continued to believe that his syncopated compositions could contribute to an emerging American school of music, but he, too, had become scornful of ragtime lyrics that relied on lewd language. The one critic who commented on the opera in the American Musician thought Joplin had succeeded in incorporating the best of African American music into a serious opera and called Treemonisha “an interesting and potent achievement.” Like most of Joplin’s other serious efforts in these years, Treemonisha faced obstacles to production. He could find no financial backing. After agreeing to stage the opera in the fall of 1913, managers of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem sold their establishment to new owners who backed out of the agreement. Joplin eventually staged the opera in the Lincoln Theater in 1915, but because of his limited resources he could afford no costumes, props, or orchestral accompaniment. The opera failed utterly to attract any critical comment.

Joplin’s final years were soured by financial ruin and debilitating disease, he died in 1917. It wasn’t until 1972 that Treemonisha was finally performed as a properly staged opera with a full orchestra.

Here’s a recent performance by the Houston Grand Opera using Schuller’s orchestration. Sung in English with Portuguese subtitles.

x YouTube Video

I’m making the open thread question very broad: What do you think about Treemonisha?

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