Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ new version of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha tells the story of a love that surpasses death. On June 14, 1904, Joplin, the future “King of Ragtime,” married Freddie Alexander, an educated and refined 20-year-old, at her family home in Little Rock. Ten weeks later, she was dead of pneumonia. “She has died but is not gone,” says Treemonisha director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj. “It’s the eternal love that when someone passes on, they don’t leave you—they stay on and become part of you.”
Freddie became her widower’s muse. Joplin could hear her voice in his mind, telling him he would become famous. He transmuted his grief into Treemonisha when he composed and wrote the libretto in 1907.
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Treemonisha opens OTSL’s 2023 festival season on May 20 and runs through June 24. Composer Damien Sneed and librettist Karen Chilton have enriched the original opera with a prologue and epilogue, making the love story between Scott and Freddie an opera within the opera. Their prologue begins on the Joplins’ wedding day, as the newlyweds celebrate and look forward to the advancement of their community. The opera ends with Scott in New York, dying and desperate to be considered a classical composer, in 1917. As he struggles to play the piano, his mind and hands weakened by neurosyphilis, Freddie appears to him as Treemonisha and calls him “Maestro.”
“What a love letter to his wife,” says Chilton. “She died so soon after their wedding—if that’s not high opera, I don’t know what is.” The main story is operatic, too, full of magical realism, enchantment, and conjurers, all rendered in an Afrofuturist aesthetic for this new iteration.
Freddie inspired Joplin to create his heroine, Treemonisha. The adopted daughter of former slaves, Treemonisha becomes a strong leader who uplifts her people. She’s aspirational. To Maharaj, she represents Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Shirley Chisholm, and other great Black female leaders. “There’s a direct line from Treemonisha to Kamala Harris,” he says. “Scott was ahead of his time, portraying and honoring Black women.”
Joplin never got to see the opera staged—in fact, it was not fully produced until 1972, 55 years after his death. In 1976, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to music.
The musical prodigy did not live to experience the full extent of his impact, but it lives on in the work of many others. Ragtime gave birth to other American genres, including jazz and hip-hop.
“He dreamt of a world that celebrates our diversity,” says Maharaj. “Our world is like a salad where no one ingredient dominates the others—a salad that feeds the soul.”
