![]() ![]() The Joplin piano rags used in the film inspired young musicians, to gain enough keyboard proficiency to plunk out their melodies. When George Roy Hill's film The Sting, starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, & Robert Shaw, was released in December 1973, Scott Joplin became a household name. This disk sold over 100,000 within a year of its release, and became the label's first million-seller. In 1970 pianist Joshua Rifkin recorded a set of Joplin's rags for the classical label, Nonesuch. His popularity reached the level of national phenomenon in the 1970s. Sporadic interest in a revival of Joplin's music began in the 1940s and gained momentum in the late 1960s. A renewed interest in his music grew roughly contemporaneous with the growth of native-composed American opera. Scott Joplin once remarked that his music would not be fully appreciated until a half century after his death. The establishment of performance venues and an audience for American opera led to such internationally-successful works by later American composers as Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1983), and John Adams' Nixon in China (1987). Among the highlights of this first flowering of American-composed opera are Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul (1950), Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955), Lukas Foss' The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1950), William Schuman's The Mighty Casey (1953), Aaron Copland's The Tender Land (1954), Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (1954), Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa (1958). Neither opera gained an immediate place in the standard repertoire, but they laid the groundwork for a first golden age in American opera beginning in the 1950s. With the premieres of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in the mid-1930s original American voices were heard on the opera stage. Though throughout the 19th century the performance of European opera was increasingly popular in the United States, American operas were looked on as imitations of European models. Until the mid-19th century the performance of an American-composed opera was not considered either economically feasible or culturally relevant. Also, by placing a female character as the leader of the community, Joplin reflects contemporary progressive thought which led to women's right to vote a decade after the composition of the opera. ![]() ![]() The character of Treemonisha, and the opera itself embody Washington's belief that progress was enabled through education. Thematically at odds with European opera, his story is in the line of thought of contemporary African American leaders such as Booker T. Although there is a minor love interest in the story of Treemonisha, the central theme of Joplin's opera is progress and the advancement of a rural community through education. The plot of the opera is quite different from many of the opera plots of the late 19th and early 20th, which typically involve love stories, often in the melodramatic and violent style associated with Italian verismo composers such as Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini. Nevertheless, the story presents American themes with specifically African American concerns. Joplin's inexperience as a writer and lack of practical experience in opera resulted in some dramatic weaknesses in the plot and staging of Treemonisha which have pointed out by critics since the first performances in the 1970s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |