Bringing Dédé Home

OperaCréole, Opera Lafayette, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra collaborate to premiere the oldest known opera written by an African American composer

by

In 1893, the Black violinist and composer Edmond Dédé set foot in his home city of New Orleans for the first time in more than thirty years. The journey from France had been difficult, his ship sinking on the way—all his baggage and sheet music lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Since he’d been gone, an entire war over the forced labor of Africans had been fought, the enslaved freed. He was no longer a free person of color, but now a Black Creole—as they were all now “free.” But racial tensions were perhaps even higher than when he'd departed, the prejudice and restrictions of Jim Crow layered nastily over the city. 

His return, after decades spent building a successful career as a conductor and composer in France, was a chance to present his success to the city of his birth. And he did; he was welcomed by his own community of Black Creoles, and even granted an honorary membership with the Black fraternal organization, the Société des Jeunes-Amis. He performed at several concerts during his time in New Orleans, but ultimately found himself unwelcome, unrecognized in the city’s most prestigious venues, simply because of his race. 

It is said that as a farewell, he wrote the song “Patriotisme”—grieving that his fate must rest across the sea because of the prejudice he faced at home. 

It’s taken more than a century, but soon, New Orleans will grant Edmond Dédé the welcome home he’s long deserved. 

In a program hosted by the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) in partnership with OperaCréole, Washington D.C.’s Opera Lafayette, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)—Dédé’s never-before-staged, long-lost operatic masterpiece Morgiane will premiere at St. Louis Cathedral on January 23, before going on to be staged in Washington, D.C. and New York City in February. 

The work, which Dédé completed in 1887 while working in Bordeaux at Les Folies-Bordelaises, is believed to be the earliest opera written by a Black American in existence. Thought to have been lost after languishing for over a century in private collections, the original handwritten manuscript for Morgiane was discovered in 2007 in the stacks at Houghton Library at Harvard, stuck in between other nineteenth century opera manuscripts from a Paris collection the university purchased in 2000. 

It’s taken more than a century, but soon, New Orleans will grant Edmond Dédé the welcome home he’s long deserved. 

By the time the New Orleans mezzo-soprano Givonna Joseph, founder and artistic director of OperaCréole, discovered the opera in 2014—she was already a devoted fan of Dédé’s. “I’ve been singing his music since, oh, I want to say before Hurricane Katrina,” said Joseph, who in the years since had collected the composer’s works from various archives, including the Tulane Music Archive, the Amistad Research Center, and the Bibliothèque Nationale. 

She is particularly fond of his song, “Mon Pauvre Coeur,” published in 1852 when Dédé was still living in Louisiana, itself the oldest piece of surviving sheet music published by a free person of color in New Orleans.

Joseph came across the Morgiane manuscript when Harvard sent a digital copy of it to Xavier University of Louisiana archives, granting her access to the entire thing, all 550 pages of it. “I was just blown away by the volume of it, the immensity, and seeing the intricacy in the fact that it was all handwritten,” she said. She knew, instantly, that she needed to hear it. It needed to be performed. 

“This is a man born in New Orleans, likely the first American-born Black opera composer, and I think America needs to know about him,” she said. “Because too many people have the wrong idea of what opera is and who it is for. And it so clearly has always been for [people of color]. We’ve always participated in it and also created it. And I think that’s just a really powerful and important statement to make in terms of our history.” 

Born in 1827 as a fourth-generation New Orleanian free Creole of color, Dédé’s musical journey began with his father, who is believed to have been a clarinetist in a militia band. He went on to train as a violinist with orchestral and operatic masters including Constantin Debergue—the founder of the Philharmonic Society, made up of mostly Black Creoles, Ludovico Gabici—director of the St. Charles Theater Orchestra, Eugène-Prosper Prévost—the French conductor at the Theatre d’Orleans and French Opera of New Orleans, and the Black composer Charles Richard Lambert. By the time he was in his twenties, Dédé was writing his own music and performing in every pit orchestra in the city that included people of color. 

But in 1856, at age twenty-nine, Dédé looked around at a New Orleans preparing for the coming Civil War, and realized that, because of the color of his skin, this place would never offer him the opportunity to reach his highest potential as a musician. Despite nightly gigs, he was still having to work at a cigar factory to make ends meet.

He left for France, where he trained with professors at the Paris Conservatoire, including the composers Fromental Halévy and Jean-Delphin Alard. He then went on to build a career in Bordeaux, first as a repetiteur at the prestigious Grand Théâtre, then as the director of the café concert hall Théâtre de l’Alcazar, and later at Les Folies-Bordelaises—composing hundreds of dances, songs, quartets, ballets, operettas, operas-comiques, and overtures—many of which were published in Paris. 

“So, we have this unbelievably prolific composer who fled from the city of New Orleans—which is so tied to the musical life America—and had to go and make his life somewhere else,” pointed out Patrick Dupré Quigley, a New Orleans native who currently serves as the Artistic Director Designate and Conductor of Opera Lafayette in Washington, D.C. “But I think he always really wanted his music to be played in New Orleans.” 

Dédé never returned to New Orleans after his visit in 1893, demoralized by the indignity of the experience. He died in 1901 in Paris, before his most elaborate work, Morgiane, could ever see the light of day.  

One thousand miles away from his hometown, working for the Opera Lafayette in Washington, D.C., Quigley discovered Dédé in the midst of a pandemic deep dive. He was reading John Baron’s Concert Life in Nineteenth Century New Orleans. Curiosity sparked, Quigley started searching for his music, eventually coming across Harvard’s digital scans of the Morgiane manuscript in early 2023. The obsession only grew stronger; like Joseph, he felt intensely that this work needed to see the light of day. 

By a remarkable twist of fate, Jonathan Woody, one of the musicians at Opera Lafayette, had previously worked with Joseph in New Orleans. Learning of Quigley’s special interest and remembering Joseph’s—he connected them in the summer of 2023. “So, we were kind of going on parallel paths and just happened to be introduced by this musician we had in common,” said Quigley. “It’s just incredible, how unlikely that two people from across the United States found each other and are working on this together to bring this to life, more than one hundred years after the composer’s death.” 

Over the next eighteen months, the two organizations reached out into the New Orleans community for support. The project felt like an instant fit for HNOC’s annual “Musical Louisiana” concert, which the Collection has hosted since 2007 in partnership with LPO as an opportunity to present productions centered around the study of Louisiana’s contributions to the classical music repertoire. Through this program, Morgiane will not only premiere for an audience at the St. Louis Cathedral, but recorded for thousands of viewers all over the world to access on the HNOC's website. 

The premiere of Morgiane falls directly into the greater mission of the HNOC, said Dhani Adomaitis, the Collection’s Programming Coordinator. “Our goal is to care for history, to sort of nurture it, and that means also being responsible for its preservation—making history available for future generations, as well as being reflective in our work and remembering the stories and histories that we share today might impact how New Orleans reflects history tomorrow. So, this program, bringing Dédé home, bringing Morgiane home, stands in perfect alignment with that mission.” 

When LPO’s Executive Director Anwar Nasir learned about the project, he instantly recalled conversations he’d had with Joseph shortly after he’d first moved to New Orleans. “It was one of the first things she mentioned to me, was this work she had been trying to get performed,” he said. “It’s incredible to finally be a part of bringing it to life.” 

“You can tell he worked with virtuosos and was able to write for them.” —Patrick Quigley 

Nasir said that the production, even beyond its historical significance, communicates an invitation to contemporary Louisiana artists and musicians that he’s been working to cultivate at LPO. “As stewards of the folks that are keeping our art forms alive, we want to uplift our artists right here, in New Orleans,” he said. “That [Dédé’s] opera didn’t get performed here, when during that time we had four or five opera houses running . . . And so many artists today still feel that they have to leave New Orleans in order to have their music played or validated. We want to be a part of not only restoring these figures from the past but also connecting them back to the present, where New Orleans artists have a home for their work in New Orleans.” 

The actual process of taking Dédé’s music from handwritten notations to the orchestra has been a thrilling challenge for all involved. Quigley—with a team that included transcriber Maurice Saylor and Derek Gretten-Harrison, who created the piano-vocal score—created official orchestrations of the over 60,0000 notes required to tell the story, working meticulously to ensure that what is performed is as true to Dédé’s intention as possible. “It’s like being Indiana Jones in a way,” said Quigley. “You’re going through old archives and rooms that no one has ever been in before, and you open them up and inside is gold. And every time you open a door, there’s more discovery, more excitement, more surprise.”

The music is a wonder in itself, according to Joseph and Quigley. “You can tell he worked with virtuosos and was able to write for them,” he said, describing the work as in the French style but with something “unquestionably American, and frankly Southern American” in the melody.

“It’s really been quite a wonderful process for people who are intellectually curious,” said Joseph. “And it’s not the easiest music. The notes were flying this way and that way.” 

Once the handwritten notes were revised into something legible for modern performers, the singers then had to translate them into sound and discover what emerged—without the benefit of example. “They are taking it off the page, and creating sound, and figuring out approaches; and there’s no video or audio to refer to, like in other known operas,” said Joseph. “Our singers become curators. It’s not work that everybody can do.” 

“They’re on this wonderful precipice. People will know they helped create this.” —Givonna Joseph

These artists, Joseph points out, are in the unique position of having their names on a work of historic significance, performed in the modern day—“They’re on this wonderful precipice,” she said. “People will know they helped create this.”

Quigley described the premiere of Morgiane as a homecoming for Dédé, a welcome home not only from the cultural descendants of the Black Creole performing arts community that celebrated his return to the city in 1893, but a long-past-due gesture of recognition and reparation from a New Orleans that failed him. “We, the sons and daughters of New Orleans, can get together and bring one of our own back to the shores, to give him the premiere he so rightly deserves.” 

RE|STORE: Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane will have its world premiere at St. Louis Cathedral at 7:30 pm on January 23. Prior to the show, the HNOC will host a preconcert panel discussion with Givonna Joseph, Patrick Dupré Quigley, Dédé’s biographer Sally McKee, and musicologist Candace Bailey—moderated by HNOC family historian Jari C. Honora. Admission is free of charge and open to the public. Learn more at hnoc.org, operacreole.org, operalafayette.org, and lpomusic.com.