A Guest of Honor (Scott Joplin)

Scott Joplin composed A Guest of Honor in 1903, shortly after his landmark ragtime pieces "The Entertainer" and "Maple Leaf Rag" had made him famous. The opera dramatised the October 1901 White House dinner where Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington — the first time an African American had dined at the presidential table. The event provoked racist outrage across the South, and Joplin saw it as a powerful subject for opera. He submitted the work for copyright on 19 February 1903, and the Copyright Office acknowledged receipt, but no deposit copy survives in the Library of Congress. Joplin organised a touring company to perform the opera in the summer of 1903, with performances documented in at least five Midwest cities. The tour collapsed financially — the box office receipts were reportedly stolen. Unable to pay his company's bills, Joplin's belongings, likely including the score and parts, were confiscated or abandoned at a boarding house. The loss is devastating: Joplin spent the rest of his life trying to establish ragtime as a legitimate operatic form, culminating in his second opera Treemonisha (1911), which was barely performed in his lifetime. A Guest of Honor would have demonstrated that Joplin's operatic ambitions preceded Treemonisha by nearly a decade and engaged directly with the most explosive racial politics of his era.