#JOPLIN COMPOSER MOVIE#

It’s actually a triple act if you consider the returning director, George Roy Hill. They reunited four years after “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a film that had established their dual act.

#JOPLIN COMPOSER MOVIE#

In 1973, “The Sting” brought to the table a celebrated movie bromance - Paul Newman and Robert Redford, one completely free of manly swagger and machismo. It also boasts of another trump card, the pervasive brilliance of Marvin Hamlisch and Scott Joplin, who weave their magic wands to create quite a refreshing, albeit identifiable soundtrack. The heart of the movie is much more than a simplistic exhibition of distraction, a dramatic narrative that cajoles our sensitivity. The film’s brilliance is entirely decorative, and despite being a “con” movie, it offers a wonderful moral conjecture. It grabbed seven Oscars with an additional three nominations. We remember Scott Joplin for his jaunty rhythms, fiendish workouts for the fingers, and courage in finding a powerful musical voice in a world that didn’t always welcome him.“The Sting,” an American classic, is one of the most enjoyable caper movies in the history of Academy Awards. In 2020, he has nearly 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, where one of his most popular tracks is an arrangement by violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman of ‘The Ragtime Dance’ for violin.

Joplin died in a mental facility, convinced he had failed at his goal – to become an African American composer of “serious music”. There are no existing manuscripts in his hand, and only three photographs of him have survived. We have little left of the man behind the music. Then in 1973, came Academy Award-winning film The Sting, that used several of Joplin’s compositions including ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Solace’.

His untimely death, caused by syphilis which descended into dementia, marked the end of ragtime and a sad lapse in interest around his music.īut his compositions were rediscovered and had a second wave of popularity in the early 1970s, when Joshua Rifkin released an extremely successful album of his pieces. Treemonisha: Overture (Scott Joplin) Joplin’s legacy Read more: Meet George Walker, the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music > “He found it very difficult to get his work performed.” “Joplin was way ahead of his time,” Henry adds. He writes for The Times: “What is great about Treemonisha is that the heroine does not die like most classical leading ladies – by the knife, by poison or yearning for a man – but becomes a leader of the community. Its moral message is education as a fundamental right for all African Americans.Ĭomedian Lenny Henry recently championed the opera in a documentary on forgotten Black classical composers. The opera, a celebration of African American culture, combines the Romanticism of the early 20th century with Black folk song tradition. A music historian at the time called the performance a “semimiracle”. Treemonisha, sometimes erroneously referred to as a “ragtime opera”, was never staged during Joplin’s lifetime – only being confirmed in its entirety in 1972, by the Houston Grand Opera. But he also wrote two operas, one – Treemonisha (1911) – for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. History has remembered Joplin as the “ragtime guy”. Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer' played on a 1915 piano Joplin’s operas

Joplin composer