Biography
According to current scholarship, Scott Joplin was born around the turn of 1867/68 in the Texas–Arkansas border region and grew up in a musical family in Texarkana. In the 1890s he travelled through the Midwest and settled in Sedalia, Missouri, where his 'Maple Leaf Rag' appeared in 1899 and made him ragtime's best-selling composer. Joplin also saw himself as a composer of large-scale stage works: after the now-lost opera A Guest of Honor (1903), he wrote his second opera, Treemonisha, from about 1910, self-publishing the piano-vocal score in 1911 without ever seeing it fully staged. He died impoverished and gravely ill in New York in 1917; only after the ragtime revival of the 1970s was Treemonisha first staged, in 1972, and Joplin was posthumously awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
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