During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also found the time to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—the first time a president has ever assumed that position. Trump’s newly chosen board of directors probably have no legal authority over the name of the center, which was declared by Congress in 1964 to be a memorial to JFK. But on December 18, 2025, they voted anyway to rename the institution as The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and added the new designation to the exterior of the building. The living president has thus claimed the Center as a memorial to himself.    

On January 9, 2026, the Washington National Opera, which has been performing at the Center for decades, announced that it would be departing immediately. And yet it still managed to mount its next planned performance—a new production of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha directed by the renowned, now retired mezzo-soprano and D.C. native Denyce Graves—on schedule, the weekend of March 7 and 8, at the Lisner Auditorium of George Washington University. A logistical near-miracle, the production was also an artistic triumph and a political vindication. Joplin’s luminous musical parable on the evils of ignorance and superstition, on redemption through education and enlightenment, is uncannily attuned to the present moment.

Joplin copyrighted and published the piano-vocal score of Treemonisha in 1911 and spent the rest of his life—until his early death in 1917, at forty-eight—trying and failing to set up a performance of what he considered the culmination of his life’s work. He had been famous since 1899, when he composed the piano piece “Maple Leaf Rag” while living in Sedalia, Missouri. With their characteristic syncopated, “ragged” rhythms, Joplin’s compositions did much to popularize the ragtime style that originated in the Black community but crossed racial boundaries even in a period of pervasive segregation and discrimination.

Associated at the time with minstrel shows and cakewalk dancing, ragtime was hardly thought compatible with elite European classical forms. Black vaudeville ensembles added the words “opera” or “operatic” to their company names almost ironically, relishing the seeming incongruity. In 1902 the singer and columnist Sylvester Russell wrote in the Indianapolis Freeman that “there is no such thing as rag-time opera.” Joplin was less dogmatic, and when he composed Treemonisha he made ragtime just one element in a score that was also shaped by European classical style. “I have used syncopations (rhythm) peculiar to my race,” he was quoted as saying in the African American newspaper The New York Age in 1913, “but the music is not ragtime and the score complete is grand opera.”¹

It was grand opera with a notable kinship to operetta and popular music, but 1911 was a year when grand opera was reinventing itself in new and modernist forms: the year of the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and the composition of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Even in this innovative moment, however, Joplin’s work was a unique experiment. It was not just the first major opera composed by a Black American but arguably the first truly American opera in its musical sources and styles, integrating the old European conventions—arias and choruses, bel canto ornamentations and climactic high notes—with diverse aspects of Black American musical culture, including ragtime rhythm, a gospel chorus, and a barbershop quartet. The overture in B-flat major, marked Allegretto (all the score markings are Italian by convention), introduces ragtime syncopation before shifting to Largo con espressione and then Adagio.

The American Musician and Art Journal took an interest early on, reporting already in 1907 that “Scott Joplin has been working a considerable time on a grand opera which will contain music similar to that sung by the negroes during slavery days, the music of today, the negro ragtime, and the music that the negro will use in the future.” In 1911, when it was possible to review the score (though not to see the opera), the same journal paid tribute to Treemonisha as “a thoroughly American opera, dealing with a typical American subject”—a Black community of formerly enslaved men and women in the mid-1880s, facing the dangers of exploitation and violence that still menaced them as they aspired to the full dimensions of emancipation. For the Journal, this was nothing less than a new kind of opera: “To date there is no record of even the slightest tendency toward the fashioning of the real American opera, and although this work just completed by one of the Ethiopian race will hardly be accepted as typical American opera for obvious reasons, nevertheless none can deny that it serves as an opening wedge, since it is in every respect indigenous.”

Joplin died, impoverished and suffering from the dementia of tertiary syphilis, at Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island in the East River. He never saw a staged performance of Treemonisha, and his ragtime celebrity was about to be eclipsed by—or perhaps absorbed into—the spirit of the coming Jazz Age. In his final years he was convinced that Irving Berlin had copied elements of Treemonisha’s spectacular concluding musical and dance number, “A Real Slow Drag,” to make a hit out of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911.

Berlin was still alive when Joplin returned to posthumous celebrity in the 1970s, beginning with Joshua Rifkin’s LP of “Scott Joplin Piano Rags,” the publication of Joplin’s collected works by the pianist-musicologist Vera Brodsky Lawrence, and a concert at the Lincoln Center Library that included excerpts from Treemonisha. In 1972 the opera had its long-delayed premiere at Morehouse College in Atlanta, followed by a larger production at Houston Opera in 1975 that helped Joplin win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize the next year. The success of the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Sting, which put Joplin’s irresistible 1902 ragtime number “The Entertainer” on the Billboard charts, further secured his new acclaim. Treemonisha, however, never established itself as a standard in the operatic repertory, and this year’s Washington production is the latest to make a powerful case for this strange, beautiful, pioneering, and still neglected work.

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The practical problem with producing Treemonisha is that it remains, in some sense, incomplete. Because the opera was never staged in Joplin’s lifetime (he organized and played the piano for one concert performance in Harlem), there was no published orchestral score, and though we know that Joplin worked on an orchestration, whatever he managed to complete has been lost. When the opera finally had its posthumous premiere in Atlanta, the composer Thomas Jefferson Anderson composed an orchestration around the piano-vocal score from 1911. A few years later the “Third Stream” composer Gunther Schuller, noted for combining jazz and classical idioms, orchestrated Treemonisha for the Houston Opera on a lusher, larger scale. 

In Washington the challenge was taken on by the pianist and composer Damien Sneed, who lightly orchestrated the score for twenty musicians, under the baton of Kedrick Armstrong, adjusting to the restricted size of the Lisner orchestra pit. Sneed notes in the program that this is his “second adaptation” of the score, having done a first version for St. Louis in 2023. He attributes his interest in Joplin’s underestimated masterwork to the late, legendary soprano Jessye Norman, whom he sometimes accompanied at the piano (and who herself sang “A Real Slow Drag” for Queen Elizabeth at the royal birthday concert in London in 1986). Norman was passionate about Joplin, as Sneed recalled: “She urged me—almost pleaded with me—to promise that I would devote myself to Treemonisha, no matter what obstacles arose. That charge became sacred to me.”

The fate of the opera Treemonisha—orphaned at a young age and taken up by adoptive stewards—is not unlike that of its eponymous heroine. She is a Black foundling, discovered under a “sacred tree” and adopted by a couple from the Texarkana region, where Joplin himself was born in 1868, just after emancipation. (His father worked on the railroad, one possible source for the glorious Treemonisha chorus of “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn.”) Having been taught to read and write as the protégé of a white benefactor, the teenage Treemonisha preaches the importance of education as a way to rise in the world, somewhat in the spirit of Booker T. Washington—whom Joplin admired, and about whom he had attempted to write an earlier opera, A Guest of Honor, which is now completely lost. When Treemonisha denounces the local “conjurers” for exploiting superstition to sell lucky charms and magic dust, they kidnap her and threaten her with a wasp’s nest, until her friend Remus arrives to rescue her.

In the ensemble finale she leads the community in “A Real Slow Drag,” a number that perhaps represents the slow path toward progress and equality. Marked Larghetto—an unhurried tempo uncharacteristic for ragtime—the “marching onward, marching onward” refrain has Treemonisha harmonizing in thirds with a second soprano in the key of F and making a thrilling octave leap to high A from measure to measure, maintaining an elegant ragtime syncopation in the leisurely tempo. Onstage, according to the libretto, the company “all march, doing the dude walk.” Joplin did provide detailed instructions for the dance steps, brilliantly realized in Washington by the choreographer Eboni Adams as the slow drag built to a hypnotic climax. The stage set, designed by Lawrence E. Moten III, offered a gorgeous backdrop of folk floral design in art nouveau patterns.

The opera’s story borrows from the forms and styles of the folktale, which, as the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar note in The Annotated African American Folktales (2018), were being rediscovered by adventurous young collectors in the Virginia circle of the Hampton Folklore Society just as Joplin was coming of age as a composer in the 1890s. (A fuller academic appreciation of Black folklore would come later in the 1920s and 1930s with the pioneering anthropological research of Zora Neale Hurston.) And yet the opera has a vexed relationship to the African American folk tradition on which it draws. Gates observes that “a certain segment of the African American community saw Negro folklore, like dialect, as a discursive remnant of slavery” and therefore “a cultural and social embarrassment,” along with cultural forms “like spirituals, like ragtime and the blues, like work songs.” As a ragtime composer, Joplin belonged to this turn-of-the-century folkloric moment, but he also shared a version of this ambivalence, which can be seen in the opera’s treatment of the conjurers. Historically, these figures would have practiced traditional forms of magic with roots in a range of African religions and in cultural traditions preserved from the days of slavery. Yet they are also the opera’s villains, denounced by Treemonisha as agents of superstition.

Denyce Graves, the most celebrated Carmen of her generation—she made her Met debut in the role in 1995—knows well that superstitions, like Carmen’s clairvoyant reading of the cards, can be integral to the operatic form. Consistent with Tatar’s observation that African American folktales, once dismissed as “signs of ignorance,” in fact “constituted a significant part of the nation’s collective cultural heritage,” Graves has given us a production that gracefully celebrates the opera’s folkloric aspects and softens Joplin’s satirical assault on ignorance and superstition. The conjurers, shown as contrite in the end, are forgiven and fully reintegrated into the Texarkana community. Meanwhile the Christian “Parson Alltalk,” who was probably intended to appear as another figure of useless and even comical superstition (“all talk”), is instead endowed with spiritual sincerity and solemnity by emphasizing the musical emotion of his gospel preaching and the community’s choral response.

Sneed acknowledges in the program note that “Treemonisha is not simply a ragtime opera.” But he also has a keen awareness that ragtime belongs to the folk texture of the work, and he uses passages of ragtime from the piano-vocal score to stitch together the opera’s scenes. At the performances Sneed played the piano himself on the side of the stage, alongside the banjo player DeAnte Haggerty-Willis (and apart from the rest of the orchestra below in the pit). It was almost as if the pianist and banjoist belonged to the fictive stage community, as if the making of communal folk music was itself part of the opera’s subject.

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Graves drew splendid performances from her cast, starting with the marvelous young Oklahoma-born soprano Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha. Bound and tethered by the conjurers, she sings a waltz-time soprano aria that looks back to the musical world of the 1890s, with echoes of the minstrel show sensation “After the Ball.” Goodwin delivered the number with lovely pathos and impassioned lyricism, accompanied elegantly by Sneed on piano. Remus, who in this production not only rescues her but marries her in the end, was designated as a tenor by Joplin but warmly sung in Washington by the baritone Justin Austin, harmonizing with Goodwin in a humming refrain that anticipated “A Real Slow Drag.” There were also superb performances from the two singers playing Treemonisha’s adoptive parents, the mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn and the bass-baritone Kevin Short. In the final act Short sings with vocally dark intensity about confronting moral peril: “When villains ramble far and near/To break the people’s laws.”

The solemn low D that concludes “When Villains Ramble” puts one in mind of Sarastro, the temple leader in Mozart’s Magic Flute, a notable precedent for Treemonisha in the operatic repertory. As a boy in Texarkana, Joplin was given free piano lessons by a German Jewish immigrant named Julius Weiss, who introduced the young musician to European classical music. When The American Musician and Art Journal reported on Joplin’s ragtime pieces in 1907, it noted that “he is delighted with Beethoven and Bach, and his compositions, though syncopated, smack of the higher cult.” Four years later the journal, evaluating the score of Treemonisha, compared Joplin to the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, who also drew on Black spiritual music and American folk rhythms for the New World Symphony (1893). One might even consider Treemonisha in relation to Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, which uses folkloric musical forms to animate a comedy of peasant village life. Composed in the 1860s, Smetana’s Czech folk opera had its first US performance at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where Joplin was also present for musical performances of his own: it was probably here that ragtime music first found a broad public.

The Magic Flute, with its fairy-tale scenario, its struggle between good and evil, its triumphant temple of virtue, and its integration of popular entertainment with high classical art, is especially relevant for understanding Joplin’s operatic purposes. Like Mozart’s opera, which explicitly denounces the superstition (Aberglaube) of the Queen of the Night, Treemonisha rallies its company and audience to advance together toward enlightenment. The climactic choral celebration of Treemonisha as the community’s new leader recalls the ascension of Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s temple finale, but Joplin, with radical flair, omits the Tamino figure. When Treemonisha asks “Who will lead the men?” the chorus assures her that she will lead men and women alike—a line that drew applause in Washington.

Lisner Auditorium, which was completed in 1946, actually looks like an Art Deco temple, with its austere neoclassicism and its right-angle columns marking out a geometrical triple entrance to the building’s limestone cubic structure. It was also the site of early struggles over desegregation in Washington, D.C., when George Washington University initially refused to admit Black theatergoers and Ingrid Bergman, performing there in 1946, joined in the protest. It was at Lisner, now integrated, that the Washington National Opera was launched in 1957, with Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, another opera about rescue from captivity. At the conclusion of Treemonisha, when the chorus acclaims the rescued heroine as their new leader, she sings in response: “There’s need of some good leader/And there’s not much time to wait.” The ensuing finale offers, with the building intensity of the syncopated ragtime march, a hopeful rallying rhythm for the challenges still ahead.