Julius Weiss

Julius Weiss (1840 or 1841 – after 1889) was a German-born American music professor, best known for being the first piano teacher of Scott Joplin, who became known as "the king of ragtime". Little was known about Weiss until 60 years after Joplin's death. The same year, Weiss was hired to privately tutor the children of a wealthy landowner in the lumber industry, Robert W. Rodgers, in Texarkana, Texas. He taught the Rodgers children such subjects as German, astronomy, mathematics, and violin. He also took on other students in town, listing his profession with the town recorder as "Professor of music."

According to Joplin biographer Rudi Blesh, Weiss, then about age 39, "heard young Joplin play and as a result gave him free lessons in piano, sight reading, and the principles to extend and confirm his natural instinct for harmony." Although young Joplin was said to have received some beginner's guidance from local teachers, it was Weiss who first introduced Joplin "to European art music," and the "European masters."

Supposed influence on Treemonisha In 1911, Joplin published one of his most important compositions, the opera Treemonisha. Berlin and other music historians, along with Joplin's widow, have pointed to similarities between the story of Treemonisha and Joplin's own lessons with Weiss. Treemonisha, the protagonist of the opera, is a black teenager who was educated by a white woman, "just as Joplin received his education from a white music teacher". Wolz, in addition, states that the "influence of mid-nineteenth-century German operatic style" is obvious in Treemonisha.

Later years and scandal Piras identifies Weiss as the same Julius Weiss who, after serving in Texarkana "as a music teacher, then a school keeper", worked as a pawnbroker and jeweler in Texarkana and eventually became president of the Texarkana Savings Bank and a significant stockholder in the H. S. Matthews Lumber Company. In 1889, he left Texarkana, absconding with over $30,000, and fled to Houston, Texas, where he resumed his pawnbroking and jewelry agency, and was also a part-time musician.

According to Albrecht, Joplin's widow said that, in his later years, Joplin kept in touch with Weiss, and upon learning that Weiss was ill and poor, sent him "gifts of money from time to time", until Weiss died. Writing more than 30 years after Albrecht, Piras sheds doubt on this assertion.