Scott Joplin made his name as "The King of Ragtime Writers," but his success in writing popular, syncopated piano pieces did not satisfy him. He aspired for success as a composer for the serious, lyric stage.

Many (though by no means all) turn-of-the-century writers categorized music according to a strict scale of values: classical music was the "best" music, having excellence that was moral as well as artistic. Opera was at the very peak of this scale. Ragtime, which was perceived as having African American origins, was placed at the bottom. Opponents of ragtime claimed that the music not only lacked artistic merit; it was harmful, as well, to listeners' intellectual, moral, and physical well-being.

Joplin naturally did not subscribe to such sentiments. However, he realized that ragtime would never bring him the artistic respect that he desired. His musical interests were also considerably broader than what could be expressed in ragtime. He therefore composed two operas, a ballet, and two orchestral works (a symphonic poem and a piano concerto, both of which are lost).

He never achieved, during his lifetime, the artistic recognition he sought. And even in ragtime, his success was limited. His "Maple Leaf Rag" was the most popular instrumental rag of the period, but few of his other works were well-known (although many were admired, and copied, by other composers).

Joplin was born in east Texas between July 1867 and January 1898. (Census records and his death certificate indicate that the often-cited date of November 24, 1868 is incorrect.) His father had been a slave, his mother was a free-born black woman. Early in Joplin's childhood, the family moved to Texarkana, living on both the Texas and Arkansas sides. His father worked as a laborer and his mother did domestic work. Both parents were reputed to have been musical, and two of Joplin's five siblings (Robert and Will) became musical performers.

Even at this early age, Joplin demonstrated his extraordinary talent for music. Encouraged by his parents, he was already proficient on the banjo, and was beginning to play the piano. The young Scott had access to a piano in a white-owned home where his mother worked, and taught himself the rudiments of music. By age eleven and under the tutelage of Julius Weiss, he was learning the finer points of harmony and style. As a teenager, he worked as a dance musician. Joplin maintained a friendship with this man during his entire life.

After several years as an itinerant pianist playing in saloons and brothels throughout the Midwest, he settled in St. Louis about 1890. There he studied and led in the development of a music genre now known as ragtime--a unique blend of European classical styles combined with African American harmony and rhythm.

Ragtime emerged in the early 1890s and became known to the wider public at the world's fair held in Chicago in 1893. (During the fair, Joplin worked with a band, playing cornet, outside the midway.) In 1893, Joplin played in sporting areas adjacent to the Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and the following year moved to Sedalia, Missouri. From there, he toured with his eight-member Texas Medley Quartette as far east as Syracuse, New York. One of his first compositions, The Great Crush Collision, was inspired by a spectacular railroad locomotive crash staged near Waco, Texas in September of 1896. The first publications of instrumental ragtime came in 1897. Joplin's first rag publication was "Original Rags," issued in 1899 by Carl Hoffman, a Kansas City firm. The cover says the music was arranged by Chas. N. Daniels, and the music was copyrighted and advertised as Daniels' composition. Afterward, Joplin was more careful in his dealings with publishers.

Early in Joplin's professional career he was a singer with vocal groups, a performer on several instruments (piano, cornet, violin), and a member of a minstrel troupe. We do not know when he began composing, but his first publications were parlor songs, issued in Syracuse, NY, while he was touring with his Texas Medley Quartette in 1895. He had just moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where soon afterward he attended the George R. Smith College, and worked as a musician.

In 1897, he met John Stark, a music dealer and small publisher in Sedalia. He arranged to have Stark publish "The Maple Leaf Rag," and had a lawyer draw up a royalty contract. The unprecedented success of this piece brought Joplin fame, and the royalties, though not overly substantial, eased the financial side of his life. (It also changed Stark's life, and he advertised his successful publishing business as "The House of Classic Rags." Stark, whose daughter Eleanor was a concert pianist and one-time student of Moritz Moskowski, maintained that the rags he issued were equal artistically to the best classical music.)

In the late 1890s, Joplin worked at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, which provided the title for his best known composition, the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899. This was followed a few years later by The Entertainer, another well known Joplin composition. Over the next fifteen years, Joplin added to his already impressive repertoire, which eventually totaled some sixty compositions.

In 1901, Joplin and his new wife Belle moved to St. Louis. There, he devoted his time to composing and teaching. He did little performing, for though he was acclaimed as a pianist in the town of Sedalia, he could not compete with the more skillful ragtime musicians in St. Louis. He was acquainted with them, however, and pianist-composer Tom Turpin, whose Rosebud Saloon was a major meeting place for ragtimers, was one of his closest friends. Another close friend was the brilliant, short-lived, pianist-composer Louis Chauvin, whose sole ragtime publication was written in collaboration with Joplin, the hauntingly, beautiful "Heliotrope Bouquet."

It was while in St. Louis that Joplin met with conductor Alfred Ernst, possibly through an introduction by his publisher's daughter Eleanor. We know little of what transpired between Ernst and Joplin, but by the end of 1901 or early in 1902 Joplin began work on his first opera: "A Guest of Honor." The story commemorates an incident that both enraged and thrilled significant parts of America: President Theodore Roosevelt's dinner invitation, in October 1901, to black leader Booker T. Washington.

Joplin filed an application with the Copyright Office in February 1903, but did not send the score along; he was anticipating its publication by Stark. He formed a company and rehearsed the opera the following summer, and began a tour in late August. Theater bookings were made for September and October in towns in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, but most were not filled. Someone associated with the company stole the box office receipts early in September, and the company disbanded. The music was never published, and the score was lost, supposedly destroyed when Joplin could not pay the boarding house bill for his troupe.

Joplin had lost most of his money on the aborted tour, and his marriage to Belle had also ended. Early in 1904 he returned to Arkansas to visit relatives. There he met a 19- year-old woman named Freddie Alexander, to whom he dedicated "Chrysanthemum," a rag bearing the subtitle "An Afro-American Intermezzo." They were married in June 1904, and then journeyed to Sedalia. Along the way, Freddie became ill, and was bedridden when they arrived in July. Two months later, in September, she died of pneumonia.

Though Joplin was to have yet one more marriage (Lottie, possibly in 1913), he was haunted by memories of his young, departed bride. It is possible, though by no means certain, that his first publication in 1905, the syncopated waltz "Bethena," bears her wedding photograph on its cover. His opera "Treemonisha," completed six years later, is set in Arkansas in September 1884, the month of Freddie's birth.

Joplin went to New York in 1907 in an effort to find a backer and publisher for the opera on which he was then working. He tried several new publishers, settling for awhile with Seminary Music, which published such favorite works of his as "Pine Apple Rag" and "Solace." In 1908, the owners of Seminary established another publishing firm, Ted Snyder Music, where a young Irving Berlin was hired as staff lyricist and occasional composer. Joplin claimed in 1911 that he brought the score of "Treemonisha" to Berlin in an attempt to have it published. Berlin turned it down, but several months later published his own, fabuously successful "Alexander's Ragtime Band," in which the verse resembles music in the "A Real Slow Drag" section of "Treemonisha." Two months later, Joplin published "Treemonisha" at his own expense, after first altering the "stolen" theme of "A Real Slow Drag."

Following the example of Wagner, Joplin wrote the libretto for this opera (as he had for his first). There are obvious autobiographical references to his mother, to his wife Freddie, and to the music of the rural Arkansas in which he was raised. The opera's story is of Treemonisha, a young woman who, through her education, is able to lead her townspeople out of the dual enslavements of ignorance and superstition. For Joplin, this was an allegory for the plight of African Americans and what he perceived as the solution.

In June 1911, a full-page review of the score of "Treemonisha" appeared in the magazine "American Musician and Art Journal." The writer praises Joplin's opera and says it is far more American in character than Horatio Parker's "Mona," which had just won a $10,000 prize for American opera from the Metropolitan Opera Company.

Thereafter, most of Joplin's energies were devoted to arranging a performance of his opera. There were several scheduled stagings, but none were realized. He composed other music (rags, songs, and longer works), but few were published. (His unpublished manuscripts were noted in court records as late as 1961, but have since disappeared.) He suffered from tertiary syphilis the last years of his life, and his health deteriorated quickly. He was hospitalized in January 1917, transferred to a mental institution, and died April 1, at the age of 49.

Joplin was mostly forgotten by the time he died. "The Maple Leaf Rag" was performed by following generations of jazz musicians, but few of Joplin's other pieces remained in the repertory. He knew that his music was not appreciated, but predicted that recognition would come a half-century after his death. His prediction was amazingly close.

Although Joplin's music was popular and he received modest royalties during his lifetime, he did not receive recognition as a serious composer for more than fifty years after his death. Then, in 1973, his music was featured in the motion picture, The Sting, which won and Academy Award for its film score. Three years later, in 1976, Joplin's opera Treemonisha won the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

American Beauty Rag	Augustan Club Waltz
Antoinette	Bethena - A Concert Waltz
Bink's Waltz	Breeze from Alabama
Chrysanthemum	Cleopha March
Combination March	Country Club Rag
Crush Collision March	Doing Something
Elite Syncopations	The Entertainer
Eugenia	Felicity Rag
Fig Leaf Rag	Gladiolus Rag
Harmony Club March	Heliotrope Bouquet
Kismet Rag	Leola
Lily Queen	Magnetic Rag
Maple Leaf Rag	Majestic March
The New Rag	Original Rags
Palm Leaf Rag	Paragon Rag
Peacherine Rag	Picture of Her Face
Pineapple Rag	Pleasant Moments
Rag Time Dance	Reflection Rag
Rose Leaf Rag	Root Beer Rag
Rosebud March	Search Light Rag
Silver Swan Rag	Something Doing
Stop Time Rag	Sugar Cane Rag
Sunflower Slow Drag	Swipesy Cake Walk
The Favorite	The Nonpareil
The Strenuous Life	The Cascades Rag
Twelfth Street Rag	The Easy Winners
The Sycamore	Wall Street Rag
Weepingwillow