a disastrous single performance...Joplin suffered a breakdown. He was bankrupt, discouraged, and worn out." He concludes that few American artists of his generation faced such obstacles: "Treemonisha went unnoticed and unreviewed, largely because Joplin had abandoned commercial music in favor of art music, a field closed to African Americans." In fact, it would not be until the 1970s that the opera received a full theatrical staging. In 1914, Joplin and Lottie self-published his "Magnetic Rag" as the Scott Joplin Music Company, which he had formed the previous December. Biographer Vera Brodsky Lawrence speculates that Joplin was aware of his advancing deterioration due to syphilis and was "consciously racing against time." In her sleeve notes on the 1992 Deutsche Grammophon release of Treemonisha, she notes that he "plunged feverishly into the task of orchestrating his opera, day and night, with his friend Sam Patterson standing by to copy out the parts, page by page, as each page of the full score was completed." By 1916, Joplin had developed tertiary syphilis, but more specifically it likely was neurosyphilis. On February 2, 1917, he was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, a mental institution. The “King of Ragtime” died there on April 1 of syphilitic dementia at the age of 48 and was buried in a pauper's grave that remained unmarked for 57 years. His grave, located at St. Michael's Cemetery in East Elmhurst was finally given a marker in 1974, the year The Sting, which showcased his music, won Best Picture at the Oscars. Works The combination of classical music, the musical atmosphere present around Texarkana (including work songs, gospel hymns, spirituals and dance music) and Joplin's natural ability have been cited as contributing significantly to the invention of a new style that blended African-American musical styles with European forms and melodies and first became celebrated in the 1890s: ragtime. When Joplin was learning the piano, serious musical circles condemned ragtime because of its association with the vulgar and inane songs "cranked out by the tune-smiths of Tin Pan Alley." As a composer, Joplin refined ragtime, elevating it above the low and unrefined form played by the "wandering honky-tonk pianists ... playing mere dance music" of popular imagination. This new art form, the classic rag, combined Afro-American folk music's syncopation and 19th-century European romanticism, with its harmonic schemes and its march-like tempos. In the words of one critic: "Ragtime was basically...an Afro-American version