The Austrian's Rag - (Entirely in Alternate AH.com threads)

WI: Scott Joplin dies of syphilis?

Celeste Violet said:
I was recently reading this book by Jack Turtledove called The Last Romantic Composer, and in there, it mentioned that around the turn of the 20th Century, right before he moved to St. Louis, Scott Joplin showed all the symptoms of syphilis. But right after he came to St. Louis, the symptoms suddenly disappeared. What would have happened if the symptoms didn't disappear, but instead intensified throughout his life.

DerHomme said:
Scott Joplin was really the one person who tied Ragtime with the classical music of the Late Romantic Period; if he wasn't around to do that, the next generation of composers like Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, and later Grappeli, Hitler, and George, wouldn't have been influenced as much by American genres as OTL. Without the influences of Ragtime and its derivatives, ATL's Expressivist classical music would have been much different.

Robert M. La Follette said:
Agreed; without the unifying force of Expressivist classical music, we might instead see the different factions of classical music go in different tangents.

Alfred said:
Turtledove's book left out some facts about Joplin's life. It really was the Coca-Colas he drank after moving to St. Louis that caused Joplin to lose his syphilis viruses. Back then, soda companies weren't as regulated as they are today; the Coca-Cola Company frequently, if unsuspectingly, placed cocaine, caffeine, and alcohol inside its drinks, and it isn't really that much of a stretch that the Coca-Colas he drank had the anti-syphilis drug azithromycin in it. It is also reported that Joplin vomited for many days after arriving at St. Louis, and a frequent side effect of azithromycin was vomiting.
 
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