STLMag.com: Scott Joplin Died In A Manhattan State Hospital April 1, 1917

St. Louis Magazine
Sunday, April 1, 2012 / 12:00 AM

by Tom Sudholt

The First "Who's Coming to Dinner": Scott Joplin's Lost Opera

Scott Joplin, 1907. Library of Congress.

Ninety-five years ago to the date of this posting—April 1, 1917—a patient died in the Manhattan State Hospital. A wasted shell of a once-great talent, he was adrift in the limbo of a dementia caused by the tertiary syphilis that had ravaged his body and mind for years. Broke and alone, defeated by life and fate, he was buried in a pauper’s grave that waited 57 years for a proper headstone. He was only 49 years old. Years before, things had been very different for him, for once upon a time, he had been one of us, a St.Louisan.

Back then, he walked the streets we do and saw some of the places we see. He knew, and used, Forest Park, Union Station and the Eads Bridge as we would. His primary time in St. Louis lasted 4 years (1901-1904), here penning two great musical classics: “The Entertainer” (1902) and “The Cascades” (1904).  Yet, save for the exquisitely singular rags he wrote for piano and an opera called Treemonisha (1911), hardly anything remains.  At a remove of 95 years, significant portions of his musical legacy and a clear portrait of the man who made them have been carried off by time’s winds into the stark, silent invisibility of things past. His music remains and the enigma of Scott Joplin, “The King of Ragtime," still resonates.

I wanted to name Scott Joplin as a St. Louisan – by upbringing or long association – who had produced the highest levels of historical achievement in the field of classical music for this month’s edition of St.Louis Magazine. When told he was in the ragtime category, I expressed disappointment. Joplin would have felt the same. His overarching ambition —and fondest wish —was to single-handedly raise ragtime above the low repute it had during his era, elevating it from popular rowdiness, to high art… nothing less than classical music, made in America. His finished, surviving works achieve this status, being very much a cut above the rest. The unrealized projects, however, might have made him still more astonishing.