Until recently, the music of Morgiane only existed in a single handwritten manuscript.
Composer Edmond Dédé, a Black American living in exile in France, completed the nearly 550-page score in 1887. He thought of it as his greatest achievement. But the four-act, French grand opera based on themes from the folktale "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" would never be performed in his lifetime. Instead the manuscript was tucked away and nearly forgotten.
Now, 138 years after it was composed, Morgiane is being produced in a concert setting. Two companies, OperaCréole and Opera Lafayette, are premiering what is perhaps the oldest existing opera by a Black American on Monday in Washington, D.C., before heading to New York and College Park, Md.
A performance of excerpts of Morgiane took place in January at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, where Dédé was baptized nearly two centuries ago.
Among those packing the pews of the historic church were dozens of the composer's descendants from New Orleans and across the country. " We're all just amazed that this is happening," says Harold August Michael Dédé III, who lives in Dallas. " I think (Dédé) shows that aspect of the indomitable human spirit that we are able to become more than the situation that we might be born into."
Givonna Joseph, co-founder and artistic director of OperaCréole in New Orleans, calls the string of shows "restorative justice" for Dédé and other Black artists whose creative output was long stifled by racism and discrimination. "We want to transform the understanding of what opera is, who it's for, who sings it, who writes it," she says. "And bring people back who may have thought it wasn't for them."
Morgiane's score is lush and Romantic, influenced by French and Italian traditions, with hints of brass band music from the American South. It's also rooted in the heyday of opera in New Orleans.
"New Orleans gets a lot of credit for the birth of jazz, but the role of New Orleans in classical music and opera doesn't get as much attention," Joseph says. "Opera has been a part of our DNA."
The city was once considered the country's beating heart of opera. In 1796, New Orleans began staging regular performances.
Free people of color participated in productions. And enslaved people "would save their money to buy their freedom, but they also bought a ticket to the opera," Joseph explains.
Born in 1827, Dédé was part of the fourth generation of free persons of color in his French-speaking Creole family. His father, a clarinetist, encouraged his musical interests. Dédé excelled at the violin, and was considered a prodigy at an early age.
But like many people of color, he faced discrimination. He left for Mexico, returned home to work as a cigar roller, until the reality of Jim Crow laws made him quit the United States for good. Like other Black artists, Dédé fled to Europe, settling in France as the American Civil War loomed.
There, he was celebrated as he composed and conducted orchestral works, art songs, ballets and operettas. Dédé audited classes at the Paris Conservatoire and later served as an accompanist and composer at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux in southwestern France. He conducted in the city's popular music halls, among them the Alcazar and the Folies Bordelaises.
"Edmond Dédé is a perfect example of making a way out of no way," Joseph says. "He wanted to speak for the people who had not had a voice." While Dédé's career in France flourished, back in the U.S., Black Americans faced diminished rights, and Southern artists of color struggled.
"Jim Crow laws are essentially what happened," Joseph says. "We got to the point of kicking people out of the French Quarter, kicking people out of the classical arena."
Dédé spent years working on Morgiane. Writing and rewriting the music, making corrections and scribbling notes in the margins.
After he finished the score, a theater in Bordeaux planned a premiere, but its leadership changed hands and the production never materialized. "Dédé's relationship was, I'm guessing, gone," Joseph says. "He presented it to the Paris Opera, but it was never picked up. And so, there it sat."
More than a century later, and through a series of twists and turns worthy of a mystery novel, Harvard University acquired the handwritten score from a collector.
After Joseph learned of the piece, she enlisted the help of Opera Lafayette to get Morgiane to the stage. The company focuses on lesser known operatic works from the 17th to the 19th centuries.
Opera Lafayette's artistic director-designate, Patrick Quigley, says it took more than a year to decipher the manuscript. "In some places it's smudged, in some places we can't necessarily make out the handwriting of the instructions or the libretto."
The process revealed an opera full of musical surprises. "He has, like, eight lines going at the same time, all doing different things, very complex harmonies, yet it feels so natural and accessible when you are listening to it," Quigley says.
Dédé was not an outlier, Quigley adds, but rather "just the very tip of the iceberg" in a community of free people of color who devoted their lives to art in 19th century New Orleans.
Quigley conducts all the performances of the multi-city tour, which features a complete cast and orchestra, but not full sets. The production includes local New Orleans singers. Some artists have national and international cachet, like soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, who sings the title role.
" I feel like I'm playing in a new sandbox that nobody else has been in yet," Williams says. She jumped at the opportunity to originate the role. She's sung in young artist programs in Seattle and Paris.
"It energizes me because it exercises muscles in my brain that I don't normally use when I'm singing Puccini, or Verdi, or Bellini, or Wagner, or any of these composers that are well worn," she says.
And "well worn" is what Williams hopes for Morgiane. It's important, she says, that a significant work of American musical history not be lost forever.
"I'm glad to be a part of righting that wrong," she says.
The broadcast and digital versions of this story were edited by Olivia Hampton and Tom Huizenga. The broadcast version was produced by Barry Gordemer.
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