Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was born in east Texas. His father had been a slave and his mother a free-born black woman. Early in Joplin's childhood, the family moved to Texarkana, living on both the Texas and Arkansas sides.
His father worked as a laborer and his mother did domestic work. Both parents were reputed to have been musical, and two of Joplin's five siblings became musical performers.
The young Scott had access to a piano in a white-owned home where his mother worked, and taught himself the rudiments of music. (As a tribute to his mother's efforts that enabled him to start his musical education, he has the heroine of his opera "Treemonisha" obtain education through her mother's labors in a white-owned home.)
His talent was noticed by a local, German-born music teacher, who further taught him music, with a special emphasis on opera and other European art forms. Joplin maintained a correspondence with this man during his entire life.
Early in Joplin's professional career, he was a singer with vocal groups, a performer on several instruments (piano, cornet, violin), and a member of a minstrel troupe. We do not know when he began composing, but his first publications were parlor songs, issued in Syracuse, NY, while he was touring with his Texas Medley Quartette in 1895. He had just moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where soon afterward he attended the George R. Smith College, and worked as a musician.
Ragtime emerged in the early 1890s and became known to the wider public at the world's fair held in Chicago in 1893.
During the fair, Joplin worked with a band, playing cornet, outside the midway.
The first publications of instrumental ragtime came in 1897. In 1901, Joplin and his new wife Belle moved to St. Louis. There, he devoted his time to composing and teaching. It was while in St. Louis that Joplin met with conductor Alfred Ernst, possibly through an introduction by his publisher's daughter Eleanor. We know little of what transpired between Ernst and Joplin, but by the end of 1901 or early in 1902 Joplin began work on his first opera: "A Guest of Honor." The music was never published, and the score was lost, supposedly destroyed when Joplin could not pay the boarding house bill for his troupe.
Scott Joplin made his name as "The King of Ragtime Writers," but his success in writing popular, syncopated piano pieces did not satisfy him: he aspired for success as a composer for the serious, lyric stage. Opponents of ragtime claimed that the music not only lacked artistic merit; it was harmful, as well, to listeners' intellectual, moral, and physical well-being. Joplin naturally did not subscribe to such sentiments: however, he realized that ragtime would never bring him the artistic respect that he desired. His musical interests were also considerably broader than what could be expressed in ragtime. He therefore composed two operas, a ballet, and two orchestral works (a symphonic poem and a piano concerto, both of which are lost).
