Scott Joplin’s only opera – which he never saw performed in his lifetime – is getting a rare production. “The only large-scale work to survive from the pen of the greatest of the ragtime composers, ‘Treemonisha’ is still a comparative rarity in performance for reasons that have as much to do with history – the piece was never performed during Joplin’s lifetime, and his original orchestrations have been lost – as with the opera’s intrinsic merits.”