(excerpts from the foreword to the libretto)
Imagine our surprise to discover that, in at least some sense, there was a specter casting its shadow across a significant portion of Western music produced during the 20th century—and that specter’s name is Julius Weiss. Honesty compels me to confess that my emotions concerning discovering a work by such a prodigious talent are mixed at best.
We have already become the target of authors who publish critical broadsides in scholarly music journals. I do not exercise a willful ego when I say that these authors are beneath my concern. I simply state that my concerns have grown wider and more varied since this project was undertaken. However, since future generations may look at Weiss’s remarkable composition in a more objective light, I believe it is worthwhile to get at least the facts concerning this unusual manuscript into the public record.
…
Admittedly, Julius Weiss’ libretto for The Unnameable Opera is a pastiche of commonplace Mississippi delta legends, popular 19th-century Western European folktales, and the fantastic fiction soon to be popularized by Lord Dunsany and, eventually, H.P. Lovecraft. This is the one fascinating quirk of the libretto. It anticipates Lovecraft’s genre-expanding horror fiction by about 30 or 40 years. Musically, however, the remarkable score serves as a virtual Rosetta Stone of 20th-century American music.
I understand this is an extreme claim to make of an unknown work, but there are many facts to back up this point of view. The most prominent of these is the intimate relationship between Julius Weiss and Scott Joplin. As Joplin’s piano teacher, Weiss imparted the vast majority of music theory Joplin was to receive in his lifetime—and certainly the most seminal.
Some theorists opine that German music scholars who settled in the American southeast brought Western European theoretical influence that melded with vibrant African rhythms to create the vocabulary of American popular music—and has strongly influenced generations of classical composition, as well.
Taking the characteristic syncopations of his African (-American) culture and merging them with traditional European classical methods of developing themes and motifs, Joplin rapidly became the most dominant voice in ragtime composition. His works influenced W.C. Handy, whose highly structured and formally realized rags (and crack live ensemble) helped pave the path that led to swing music.
…
I cannot help but feel, on some level, that The Unnameable Opera had indeed been destroyed. Certainly, there was nowhere near enough of the score remaining to mount a creditable performance of the work as it stood. Perhaps, as some scholars assert, I have simply enforced my will on a fragmentary, historical document without context. But, perhaps, my ambitions were carried out to the extreme edges of hope. Perhaps, with my collaborator’s aid, I have re-created The Unnameable Opera.
God Help Me.