When he died on April 1, 1917, in a New York hospital from complications of syphilis, Scott Joplin was not yet 50. Financial troubles and artistic disappointments — especially over his inability to drum up interest in his opera, “Treemonisha” — marked the composer’s last years.

A counterbalance to Joplin’s unfortunate passing comes from his lasting fame as the greatest master of ragtime, the melodically catchy, infectiously syncopated style that made an essential contribution to the history of American music.

To celebrate that contribution and acknowledge the centennial of Joplin’s death, pianist Richard Dowling performs a program called “Great Scott” tonight at Germano’s.

The program will offer a taste of Joplin’s 53 surviving works for piano, all of which Dowling memorized and performed April 1 in the Weill Recital Hall of New York’s Carnegie Hall. Dowling also recorded the complete piano music — rags, waltzes, marches — on a three-disc set recently released by Rivermont Records.

“I was a piano student at just the right time, when the movie ‘The Sting’ came out [in 1973] and used Scott Joplin’s music,” says the Texas-born, New York-based Dowling. “I begged my piano teacher to let me play ‘The Entertainer,’ and she did.”

Dowling, now 52, went on to become a classical pianist performing keyboard music by the likes of Chopin and Ravel throughout the world. But he never lost that early enthusiasm for Joplin, which got a boost from the LPs made in the 1970s by pianist and musicologist Joshua Rifkin. Rifkin treated the rags as respectfully as he treated the music of Bach.

“I wore out the grooves of Volume 1,” Dowling says. “It was one of the few ragtime records at the time that didn’t use a honky-tonk piano, an out-of-tune upright with tacks on the ends of the hammers. As an adult musician, I still listen to Rifkin’s recordings. I question some of his choices, but I certainly respect his playing.”

The biggest choice for any pianist approaching Joplin may well be tempo. The sheet music of the composer’s pieces famously includes his instruction: “Notice! Don’t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.”

Dowling has considered this issue for a long time, discussing it at length with the esteemed ragtime pianist and scholar Max Morath.

“As Max says, everything boils down to: What is the appropriate character of an individual piece, and what is common sense? For me,” Dowling says, “the answer was hiding in plain sight — in the ‘School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano’ that Joplin wrote.”

What Dowling seized on was not the “slow march tempo” that Joplin specified, but an instruction added only in those exercises: “Count two.”

“If you count two beats to a measure instead of four,” Dowling says, “that’s a slow march. That’ll be the correct tempo, but the music won’t sound slow.”

Dowling likes to talk to audiences about this and other subtleties of ragtime, such as structure (rags reveal a form as carefully ordered as a Beethoven scherzo) and how Joplin brilliantly broke the rules when it served his artistic purpose.

The pianist’s immersion in all things Joplin also means that he has at the ready plenty of anecdotes about the composer and his expertly crafted, infectious music, including the story of a typesetter’s error that left us with an off-base title for one of the pieces.

Dowling’s all-Joplin Baltimore program is one of dozens he has scheduled this year and next (2018 is the 150th anniversary of Joplin’s birth). While some stops involve conventional concert venues, he also enjoys opportunities in informal settings, such as the cabaret/restaurant milieu of Germano’s.

“People can be much more comfortable, eating and drinking,” Dowling says. “And my motto is: The more you drink, the better I sound.”

tim.smith@baltsun.com

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