A Lost Opera is Found: Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane

After 138 years, the first known opera by a Black American composer is receiving its world premiere. A single handwritten manuscript of Edmond Dédé’s long-lost opera was discovered in 2007 at Harvard’s Houghton Library, stuck in between other 19th-century opera manuscripts from a recently acquired Paris collection. Over 18 months, the manuscript’s 60,000 notes were painstakingly transcribed into official orchestrations, making this long overdue performance possible.

To mark this historic moment, the manuscript score is on view at the Folger through March 2 as part of our Out of the Vault exhibition. On January 16, in partnership with Opera Lafayette, the Folger is presenting a panel discussion on Dédé and his musical legacy accompanied by musical selections from Morgiane. The free event will also be livestreamed.

Scholar Candace Bailey, author of the forthcoming Edmond Dédé: “Morgiane, ou, Le Sultan d’Ispahan” from Cambridge University Press, introduces us to this important American composer who wrote nearly 100 critically and popularly acclaimed works for the French stage and the work of OperaCréole and Opera Lafayette to bring Dédé’s magnum opus Morgiane to life.

The composer Edmond Dédé’s name is fast becoming a familiar one among scholars who study music in the 19th-century United States. Sally McKee’s The Exile’s Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2017) has caught the attention of many who seek to broaden representation in classical music or those interested in seeing connections between the Old and New Worlds in a more accurate view that acknowledges the work of people of color.

However, most people have yet to be introduced to this man. His travels alone would pique readers’ imaginations, and his compositions provide a clear picture of the musical world of late 19th-century France—tinged with elements that tie it back to Caribbean New Orleans.

Born in New Orleans in 1827 to free people of color, Dédé’s musical talent surfaced early. By 1850, he had studied violin with Constantin Debergue, director of the “Negro Philharmonic” (to use the 19th-century Black musicologist James Trotter’s name for the orchestra made up of men from the many racial designations used in New Orleans), and Ludovico Gabici, conductor in the city’s St. Charles Theater, music publisher, and composer. Dédé left Louisiana in 1848 for Mexico but returned in 1851. In 1852, he self-published his first song “Mon pauvre cœur,” a short song for voice and piano. Soon thereafter, he left the United States again, only to return for performances in 1893.

After moving around France and Belgium, and a brief expedition to England, Dédé settled in Bordeaux in 1859. He took a position as second conductor of the ballet at the Grand Théâtre—an institution where grand operas such as Halévy’s La Juive and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots could be heard with some frequency. He composed music for this theater, including several ballets and established himself to the point that Paul Lavigne suggested in the local newspaper Le Renard that the composer, along with several others in the city, be permitted to stage some one-act comedic operas during the grand opera’s vacation. Nothing has surfaced as to whether this suggestion came to fruition, but a list of his works published in around 1880 includes such pieces.

Professional musicians embarked upon smaller concerts and recitals when not busy with their theater gigs, and Dédé was no different. One such event was the Salon des cercles artistique in April 1864, where he played violin in a septet by Beethoven. More significantly for his career, at about this time he began pursuing employment in venues such as cafés-concerts and casinos, and by 1870 Dédé’s name became locally famous for his work in the Alcazar and Café-Delta. He also traveled extensively, supporting himself and his young family by working in the casino in Marseille and the opera house in Algiers! His publications from this period confirm his affinity with the popular styles required by these types of institutions, and many of them contain dedications to prominent performers, especially those of the famous Parisian venues like the Eldorado, known today from Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster of Aristide Bruant’s performance there in 1892.

In 1888, Dédé dedicated his “La Malagaise” to L. Brunet of Bordeaux—who must have been the Louis Brunet responsible for the libretto to Morgiane. The surviving manuscript of the opera, dated 1887, lists both Dédé and Brunet, composer and librettist, on the first page. An L. Brunet of the Gironde, the region in which Bordeaux is located, belonged to L’Institut d’Afrique during the 1860s, as did Dédé. Dedicated to abolishing slavery, this organization of men of African descent included members from the United States, Europe, Africa, and island nations throughout much of the world. That two Black men in Bordeaux can be located among its constituents and that two men, at least one confirmed of African descent, worked together on an opera with race at its foundation cannot be a coincidence.

That opera, Morgiane, pits good Arabs against evil Persians, incorporating characters from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (in name only). At the beginning, Amine (soprano) and Ali (tenor) are celebrating their wedding day. She calls on her mother, Morgiane (mezzo-soprano), to reveal the name of her father. For as long as she can remember, she has lived with her stepfather, Hagi Hassan (baritone). Morgiane refuses, but Ali says it does not matter, reminding Amine that he is an orphan. At the end of Act 1, Persian soldiers of the Sultan arrive under the direction of Beher (baritone) and take Amine away. Act 2 consists of a market in Persia, where Ali, Morgiane, and Hassan plot to rescue Amine and kill the Sultan. We meet the Sultan, whose name is Kourouschah (bass), finally in Act 3, when he reveals his plan to make Amine his Sultana, temporarily, commenting that the local people should be pleased if he impregnates their daughters. Amine protests his advances to no avail. At a grand entertainment, Ali, Morgiane, and Hassan perform as entertainers, narrating a tale in which a rich shepherd steals the favorite sheep of a lowly shepherd. When he complains that this is boring, Ali loses his temper and unmasks their disguises, which results in their being arrested and imprisoned. In Act 4, Kourouschah gives Amine the choice between being his lover or dying with her family. She chooses the latter. As the Sultan begins to pass judgment over the quartet, Morgiane reveals that he is Amine’s father and she had been his Sultana years ago. Upon learning this, Kourouschah asks for forgiveness, blesses the union of Ali and Amine, and all is well.

At the heart of this dark comedy is a question: can we judge someone based on race alone? What began as a clear-cut division between Arabs and Persians becomes an entangled story that turns on two women who left Persia for Arabia. The parallel for Dédé’s own life—leaving the United States’ largest slave market for life in a country where slavery has been repealed but where his skin color continues to be the first aspect that people use to describe him—must be considered in how one understands Morgiane. References to Amine and Morgiane’s white skin further complicates this narrative.

Dédé never saw Morgiane staged, for reasons that can only be surmised. Many commentators in French journals complained about the difficulties of getting new operas performed because the directors were hesitant to spend the amount of money required for premieres of new works, among other reasons. Race, too, may have played a role. In spite of its dismissal or neglect in the 19th century, Morgiane miraculously survived. Any thoughts the Grand-Théâtre’s director in the 1880s, Tancrède Gravière, had about Dédé’s score have not survived. Dédé submitted it to him, but its history after that is murky. The first identified owner of the current manuscript was Jean-Marie Martin, a well-known collector of French opera sources. From him the manuscript passed on to Bernard Peyrotte, who managed a music store on the rue de Rome in Paris, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library obtained it from Peyrotte in 2000. Staff at the Houghton have digitized Morgiane, making it available for public use.

Morgiane score, pages 230–231, on view at the Folger

The sole surviving source, the manuscript thankfully exists as a full score, meaning it includes all of the instrumental parts as well as the vocal ones. But it is messy, having been copied, corrected, and edited in numerous places. These emendations suggest that some people heard the music, and Dédé subsequently made changes. If so, parts may have been copied for these performances. Today the manuscript consists of two bound volumes, but when they were bound remains a mystery. A new title page prefaces the third act, which strongly suggests that it was copied as two distinct manuscript volumes. A piano/vocal score has disappeared but is referenced in the Houghton manuscript.

It has taken a few years to transcribe Morgiane. Parts of it, particularly the third act, require substantial deduction on the part of the transcriber in order to determine such fundamental information as which instrument takes which line in the score. On many occasions, one part, e.g., a clarinet in A, will be on the fourth line from the top on one page only to be found on the sixth line when turning the page, and sometimes parts will be out of order, say the bassoon will be beneath the brass. Dédé wrote for instruments that needed physical changes to play in unrelated keys, e.g., French horns without pistons or valves, but often the moves from one crook to another have been left out. Only through trial and error can these issues be deciphered. The composer also included an onstage instrumental ensemble, a banda, but how it differed from the pit orchestra is not explained other than it appeared with the singers and dancers. A large percussion section, which adds an exotic flavor to the sound of the opera, has notated parts, but we might consider that some of it might have been improvised to sound closer to a non-European ensemble.

The premiere of Morgiane on January 23, 2025, will feature an all-Black cast: something Dédé can only have imagined in 1887. Opera Lafayette, Artistic Director Designate Patrick Quigley, in collaboration with OperaCréole, Founder and Artistic Director Givonna Joseph, is offering four concert performances, beginning in New Orleans at St. Louis Cathedral, Dédé’s baptism site, followed by performances in Washington, DC, New York City, and College Park, Maryland. It will be the first time the opera has been performed in public. The work required to bring Morgiane to life has been substantial, and Quigley and Joseph are to be congratulated on their passionate drive in seeing this project through.

The performances—and proposed recording—will offer the first sonic record of Edmond Dédé’s music beyond his songs for piano and voice or his waltzes for dance band and will undoubtedly mark the beginning of a revival of his music. Before better known men such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black English composer of the early 20th century, and William Grant Still, known as the “Dean of Afro-American composers”, Dédé composed music for large ensembles in the western Classical style, contributing works in various styles associated with French theater music. So little of it has survived that we will never know the extent of his accomplishment, but Morgiane proves his mastery of orchestration, operatic vocal conventions, and musical drama. Thankfully we can finally hear it.