Treemonisha Joplin
Manitoba Opera

Saturday, November 21 at 7:30 pm
Wednesday, November 25 at 7:00 pm
Friday, November 27 at 7:30 pm

Sung in English with projected English titles.

A triumphant adaptation of Joplin’s groundbreaking opera, reimagined for the 21st century.

The Story

It is the late 1880s in the Deep South. A people are divided against themselves. A group of upwardly mobile Freedmen are now running a plantation near Texarkana. They are striving to become an essential part of an emerging new America.

In the surrounding forest, a group of Maroons are rebuilding a nearly lost connection to their African ancestry. They do not value a country that has so recently seen them as nothing but property.

Their coexistence is fragile but functional, until it is shattered by an act of violence.

Into this conflict comes a young woman who discovers she has roots in both communities. At this crucial moment in history her choices will determine the future. Her name is Treemonisha.

The Music

Treemonisha is one of the few surviving classical music pieces about the immediate post-slavery era written by a Black person who lived through the period.

America’s “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin fused classical music with the syncopations of ragtime and the folk and Gospel sounds of his childhood in the Deep South. This fusion was original, born in the mind of a genius from the collision of cultures, and entirely ignored by the White establishment of the 1900s.

Inspired by Joplin’s vision, a group of extraordinary Black women artists have reimagined Treemonisha from their own 21st century viewpoint. They have fused a new story onto the original setting and characters, and created a lush new orchestration for Joplin’s extraordinary melodies and harmonies.