With Scott Joplin's "The Ragtime Dance," "The Entertainer"
and "Maple Leaf Rag" on Sunday's Casual Classics program, I ventured out into Heat Advisory
City to track down a
memory. In the summer of 2000, Opera Theatre of St. Louis opened its 25th-anniversary
season with Joplin's
Treemonisha, his sole surviving
opera. It's known that he wrote an opera prior to Treemonisha, A Guest of Honor,
which dramatized Booker T. Washington's visit to Theodore Roosevelt's White
House. Joplin toured a production of A Guest of Honor around the Midwest, and pretty much went broke because of it. The
opera score and libretto have disappeared. If you happen to find it in your
great-grandparents' attic, you'll have truly found something.
I wrote about the OTSL production of Treemonisha for a local newspaper, and
during my research walked around the part of town where Scott Joplin once
lived. I used to imagine a Scott Joplin walking tour: the house on Delmar, the
block where his 13-room home on Lucas used to be, the corner on Market St. where
the Turpin brothers' Rosebud Saloon was once the "Vatican and Wailing Wall of
ragtime"--as Joplin historian Jan Hamilton Douglas told me--and on to Union
Station, through which most everybody, white and black, entered the city.
Although, for the most part, one group went east and the other went west once
they got here.
But not entirely. By 1901, the German director of the St.
Louis Choral-Symphony Society, Alfred Ernst, had befriended Scott Joplin, and
praised him in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch: "Scott Joplin of Sedalia, a negro, an extraordinary
genius as a composer of ragtime music." Joplin played ragtime for Ernst. Ernst played
Wagner, especially Tannhauser, for Joplin.
The St. Louis Choral-Symphony Society would later be known
as the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. So when the SLSO plays Joplin
Sunday, it's playing the music of a St.
Louis composer to whom it has a direct and poignant
link.
Along my walking tour, I came across the empty brick shell
of the Original Restaurant, "EST 1905." Given where it sits in Joplin's
St. Louis
universe, I figured he had to have eaten there.
And here it is today, crumbling on Olive St. Accompany these photos with a
slow piano rag, for as Scott Joplin said: "It is never right to play ragtime
fast."
