Opera Lafayette to premiere oldest known opera by black American composer

Thu Jan 30, 2025 at 3:21 pm
Photograph of Composer Edmond Dédé (1827-1901)
Composer Edmond Dédé (1827-1901)

Sometimes finding a musical treasure is sheer serendipity.

A librarian cleaning a cupboard in a Pennsylvania seminary stumbles on a piano duet transcription of Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue in the composer’s own hand. Preparing for a renovation at Russia’s St. Petersburg Conservatory, librarians find a copy of Stravinsky’s long-lost “Funeral Song.” A curator perusing miscellaneous archives at the Morgan Library in New York unearths an unknown waltz by Chopin.

But sometimes musical discoveries are hiding in plain sight, patiently waiting for someone to take notice. Morgianeou Le Sultan d’Ispahan, a grand opera composed in 1887 by Edmond Dédé, a black, free-born New Orleans native based in France, is a case in point. Meticulously preserved in a handwritten 550-page score but considered lost until the early 2000s, the work will have its first performance in New York next week. The performance—a concert version with costumes but no sets—is a collaboration between Washington-based Opera Lafayette, a company devoted to rarely performed 18th- and 19th-century works, and New Orleans’ Opera Créole.

Morgiane is considered the oldest complete opera by a black American composer as yet discovered. Borrowing loosely from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, its plot is typically exotic 19th-century operatic fare, involving a beautiful Arabian bride abducted by an evil Persian sultan. Her family attempts a rescue and is condemned to death. At the last minute, in a twist worthy of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the sultan relents and all is well. Conductor Patrick Dupre Quigley, Opera Lafayette’s artistic director-designate, calls it “a dark comedy,” one that “moves with the quickness of a piece of operetta or musical theater.”

Dédé was born in 1827 to a family that had been free people of color in New Orleans for three generations. As a youngster he became known as a violin prodigy, and by his 20s he was an integral part of the city’s thriving opera and operetta scene. But he sought better opportunities outside the United States, first in Mexico, then in France and Belgium. By 1857 he was studying at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1859 he became assistant conductor for ballet at the Grand Théâtre in the French city of Bordeaux. Within a few years he shifted to the city’s popular music halls, including the Folies Bordelaises and Théâtre l’Alcazar.

“Much of his life as a professional in Bordeaux,” said Quigley, “was conducting ballet and opera. But he was also working as music director at operetta, musical theater and popular music venues.” Dédé composed as well, writing more than 100 works that were both popular and critically acclaimed during his lifetime.

Morgiane was his magnum opus, a summation of all he had learned as a conductor in the opera house and popular theaters. Both his home theater in Bordeaux and the Paris Opera declined to stage Morgiane. Racial prejudice may have been a factor, but French opera companies were notoriously wary about producing new works at the time. Dédé died in 1901 at age 73, and his handwritten score, with complete orchestration and libretto, disappeared.

Many decades later it turned up, unidentified, in the collection of a French opera enthusiast that eventually found its way to a shop on Paris’s Rue de Rome. The street is famous for its music stores and instrument makers, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library purchased a collection from the shop in 2000. By 2007 the library had identified the score as Dédé’s Morgiane. A few years later it made a digitized version of the score available.

Givonna Joseph, a mezzo-soprano who founded Opera Créole with her daughter in 2011, first encountered Morgiane in 2014 when a digitized version landed at Xavier University in New Orleans. Opera Créole champions forgotten works by composers of color, and Dédé had been on Joseph’s radar. The company has performed several of his works.

“It means everything” to present Morgiane, Joseph told Gambit, a New Orleans alternative weekly. With the help of substantial grants, Opera Créole and Opera Lafayette have transcribed Dédé’s score into usable performing parts for their production’s six principals, 16-voice chorus, and full-size orchestra. Lead singers will be soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams as Morgiane, the bride’s mother; soprano Nicole Cabell, the bride; bass Kenneth Kellogg, the sultan; tenor Chauncey Packer, the bridegroom; baritone Joshua Conyers, the bride’s stepfather, and bass-baritone Jonathan Woody, a Persian soldier.

But the news about Dédé’s newly identified score was slow to filter into the larger musical community. Musicologist Candace Bailey is a Distinguished Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts at North Carolina Central University, an HBCU in Durham, N. C. She has done extensive research on composers of color and is writing a book about Dédé for Cambridge University Press. But she didn’t know about the Morgiane manuscript until 2018.

“I was at Harvard doing research,” Bailey recalled, “and the archivist said, ‘You do work on the South. You do work on New Orleans. Do you know we have this manuscript here’? And she brought it out. I didn’t know it existed at that point. The things I read said it had been lost.”

Bailey heard about plans to stage the piece. She contacted Quigley and Joseph and has been involved with lectures and presentations on the opera. (Opera Lafayette, Opera Créole, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra presented a 90-minute excerpt of the piece January 24 in New Orleans’ historic St. Louis Cathedral with soprano Taylor White as the bride. Dédé was baptized in the cathedral as an infant.)

Photo of performance of Morgiane
(L-R) Taylor White, Joshua Conyers, and Jonathan Woody performed excerpts of Morgiane with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Patrick Quigley on January 24. Photo: Amber Johnson, HNOC

Morgiane is completely different from things most people know from France in the late 19th century,” said Bailey. “It has so much more than the repertoire most of us know.”

Thanks to his work in French music halls and cabarets, Dédé became a gifted songwriter. “Dédé was a very good pop composer,” she said, “like Michael Jackson was a very good pop composer.”

Morgiane is definitely in the operetta spirit,” she said, “but it’s got some Caribbean stuff, some habanera-type things, bolero-style rhythms in some of the dances. When it doesn’t have that [popular] style, the orchestra can get very big. It’s a massive sound and there’s amazing counterpoint.”

“What statement is Dédé making with this opera?” she asked. “I think he’s making some very big, very bold statements. I think he’s saying, ‘There’s more to me than you can see. Now watch what I can do.’ He shows all of it in this opera: the pop music side, the lyrical side, the very big dramatic writing for the orchestra. It really is the culmination of his career.”

Presenting Morgiane carries deep significance for both Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole. For thirty years Opera Lafayette has presented rarely performed works. Quigley is also the founder and artistic director of Seraphic Fire, a Miami-based vocal ensemble presenting historical as well as contemporary music.

Morgiane is “a very cool and exciting show,” said Quigley. “The arias are very catchy and tuneful. There’s a lot of patter, sort of Sondheimian patter. The music is so varied.”

But its world premiere means more to him than just offering audiences an entertaining night out.

“I believe there’s so much interesting music out there,” said Quigley, “and we play so little of it. For every person we know, there were hundreds, if not thousands, who were working in the same business at the same time and competing with them. My primary goal is to do for the 18th and 19th centuries what contemporary ensembles [that showcase a wide range of living composers] are doing for the 21st century.”

After leaving his hometown in the mid-1850s, Dédé returned to New Orleans just once, in 1893. The Black music community celebrated his successful European career, but Jim Crow laws had set in. He was not allowed to perform in the city’s leading music venues.

“My daughter [Aria Mason] always said that what we were doing was restorative justice for composers of color,” Joseph told Gambit. “I’m hoping this will also be transformational justice…that people will hear this work and want to present it all over the country. It’s worthy to become part of what we call the opera canon.”

Opera Lafayette performs Morgiane 7 p.m. February 5 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. operalafayette.org

Wynne Delacoma is a freelance arts writer, lecturer, and critic whose outlets include the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Classical Review, and Musical America. Formerly the classical music critic on staff for the Chicago Sun-Times, she also has served as an adjunct faculty member teaching arts criticism and reporting at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.


One Response to “Opera Lafayette to premiere oldest known opera by black American composer”

  1. Posted Feb 02, 2025 at 6:31 pm by Leon Bridges

    This report was outstanding.

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