Scott Joplin's Treemonisha — A Musical Reimagining

“With this adaptation of Joplin’s groundbreaking opera, Jannina Norpoth and I pay tribute to his musical inventiveness from our vantage point as 21st Century creators. We are treating his music as the center point wherefrom the pendulum will swing. Joplin 360°.” — 2024 Grammy-winning composer Jessie Montgomery

An extraordinary core creative team of Black women artists, brought together by Volcano, a Toronto-based production company whose work transcends borders of all kinds — international, artistic, and cultural — gives the U.S. premiere to Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, an inventive reimagining of the composer’s often-overlooked 1911 opera and one of The New York Times’ top classical music performances of 2023.”

The sole surviving opera by Joplin, the “King of Ragtime,” Treemonisha was a groundbreaking work that fused Western classical music with popular Black music from the era, including blues, gospel, and ragtime. The work was never produced during Joplin’s lifetime — he spent his life savings attempting to bring Treemonisha to the stage but faced significant obstacles as a Black composer trying to secure funding at the dawn of the 20^th century. Joplin died penniless and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, his revisions and orchestrations for Treemonisha erased by decades of subsequent neglect. Only an early first draft of his piano-vocal score remained. 

Flash forward to the present, where a group of extraordinary Black artists from around the world have reimagined Joplin’s fragmentary opera for the 21^st century, fusing a new story onto Joplin’s setting and characters and creating a lush new orchestration for Joplin’s melodies. Set in the late 1880s, Joplin’s characters struggle to figure out how to move forward as citizens in the aftermath of enslavement, with some choosing to embrace America, and others choosing to honor Africa. With each group condemning the other, a guiding light emerges in the form of an extraordinary young woman: Treemonisha.

Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha — A Musical Reimagining combines all of the original source material with a new story and libretto by acclaimed playwright and broadcaster Leah-Simone Bowen along with Emmy-nominated co-librettist Cheryl A. Davis. Co-arranger/orchestrators are Grammy-winning composer Jessie Montgomery, and two-time Grammy nominee Jannina Norpoth. Soprano Neema Bickersteth, called “an incredible performer” by The Guardian, heads up an all-Black cast in the title role, with an all-Black orchestra playing both Western and African instruments, led by international award-winning African American conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, and directed by renowned stage director Weyni Mengesha. 

The resulting production is a transcendent example of what American opera can be. 

“Joplin’s long-forgotten masterpiece has been ravishingly reborn for the 21st century in a triumphant production” — Toronto Star