Found: A Manuscript That Unlocks a Forgotten Black Composer's World

New York Times

28-01-2025

In 1887, a composer completed the greatest work of his life: a grand opera, 545 pages long, telling a story of epic proportions. And as he read over his manuscript one last time, he seemed to know that what he had accomplished was important.
'Fin de l'Opera,' he wrote on the last page. Then the composer — a Black American, living in exile in France, and about 60 years old — took his pen and signed his name with panache.
'Edmond Dédé,' he wrote in sweeping letters.
It was a name that had briefly meant something in the 19th-century musical world — at least on the fringes. In New Orleans, where Dédé was born in 1827 as a free person of color, he was hailed in newspaper accounts as a 'violin virtuoso' and 'a composer of real merit.' And in Bordeaux, France, where Dédé spent the peak years of his career, he was more than a talented musician; he was a celebrity. Dédé composed and conducted orchestral pieces, ballets and one-act operettas until he became, in the words of one French critic, 'perhaps the best-known man in Bordeaux.'
But Dédé faced prejudice on two continents during his lifetime. Critics who celebrated his talent often made disparaging remarks in the same articles, calling him 'ungainly,' 'by no means graceful.' And his grand opera 'Morgiane,' his magnum opus, completed in 1887, never made it to the stage.
Now, almost 125 years after Dédé's death, an unlikely team, including a historian, an antiquarian music dealer, two librarians, and a pair of New Orleans natives, has come together to salvage Dédé, make relevant his legacy and stage his greatest work for the first time.
'Morgiane' was performed, in an abbreviated form, last week in New Orleans, but it is set to be performed in full next month in Washington, D.C.; College Park, Md.; and in New York, on Feb. 5 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The show, a joint of production of Opera Lafayette and OperaCréole, features a Black cast, an orchestra playing period instruments, and a claim of historical importance: 'Morgiane' may be the oldest existing opera by a Black American.
Patrick Dupre Quigley, the show's conductor, says he can hear this history ringing throughout Dédé's work. 'Morgiane' is in many ways an archetypal late 19th-century French opera, but with influences from the American South and popular French music. The sound is, ultimately, distinctly Dédé, Quigley said. And it's a kind of miracle that they ever found it at all.
'It's water into wine,' he said, sitting next to Givonna Joseph, the show's director, one morning last July as they prepared to rehearse for the first time at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. 'It took a long, long time,' Quigley said. 'It's late. But it's not too late to know Dédé.'
EDMOND DÉDÉ GREW UP in a world that most people have forgotten, even classical musicians. In the early 1800s, free people of color thrived playing classical music in New Orleans. Black orchestras played to Black crowds in packed concert halls. Black musicians experimented with form and sound in a city that decades later would give us jazz. Dédé even trained for a time with a white music instructor, and his talent with the clarinet and the violin made him something of a sensation in the city.
In 1878, James Trotter, a formerly enslaved man, published a book about 'remarkable musicians of the colored race,' and included a passage on Dédé, saying he threw 'his whole soul' into his music onstage and was 'very popular.'
But with each passing decade, life in the 19th century became harder for free people of color in New Orleans. Sally McKee — a retired professor of history at the University of California, Davis, who began to dig into Dédé's story in the early 2000s — said Dédé came of age in an era when laws required him to carry proof of his free status when walking the streets. By the 1840s, things had gotten worse: 'Free people of color were constricted more and more,' McKee said, 'from jobs, from being able to enter certain parts of the city, from leaving the city and returning.'
Around 1848, Dédé had seen enough and went to Mexico City for a spell. But by the early 1850s he was back in New Orleans, working by day as a cigar roller and playing his music at night. About this time, he wrote 'Mon pauvre coeur' ('My Poor Heart'), a song that is, McKee said, one of the oldest published by a Black American. Then, around 1855, he left for good, moving to France to pursue a life in music. 'He wanted to be a composer in the art music tradition,' McKee said. 'He wanted to be like Mendelssohn. He wanted to be like Brahms.'
But Dédé had no money and had to make a living. He took conducting jobs in Bordeaux, worked in provincial theaters. And he produced shows that were often more like vaudeville than high art, McKee said, laboring over his opera on the side for years.
Dédé made notes in the margins of his 'Morgiane' manuscript, crossed out entire pages, rewrote the music again and again, and changed its title. At first he called his opera 'The Sultan of Ispahan,' after the villain of the story — a sultan who steals a young bride to have her for his own. But Dédé renamed it for a more sympathetic character: Morgiane, the bride's mother, who goes off in search of her abducted daughter and serves up an unexpected twist in the end.
It was Dédé's dream, McKee said, to have 'Morgiane' performed. But it never happened. Dédé moved to Paris around 1889 and his star soon faded. By the time of his death, in 1901, his family seemingly didn't even have money for a proper burial. Dédé ended up in a communal grave outside Paris, with no headstone or marker. And with his death, the manuscript for 'Morgiane,' bound into two hulking volumes, did what many overlooked works tend to do.
It disappeared.
ALMOST A CENTURY LATER, in 1999, Lisa Cox, a dealer of antiquarian music based in England, got a phone call from a man who operated a music store in Paris. His name was Bernard Peyrotte and he was calling with some news.
Peyrotte and a French conductor, Jean-Marie Martin, had been collecting musical scores for half a century. Some dated back to the 1600s. There were nearly 10,000 in all, and Peyrotte had made a decision: He was selling.
'It was an incredible collection,' Cox said in an interview recently. Peyrotte and Martin didn't just have operas by Verdi, Wagner and some of the biggest French composers of the 19th century; many of the scores had unique updates and variations, and some came from unexpected places, like modern-day Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. The collection was eclectic, rare, significant. And Cox knew who to call about purchasing it: Virginia Danielson, who was at the time the Richard F. French librarian at Harvard University's Loeb Music Library.
In fall 2000, Cox and Danielson traveled to Peyrotte's house outside Paris, where they chatted over wine and cheese. Then Danielson spent a few hours there reviewing Peyrotte's scores and quickly made a determination. 'The collection,' she said, 'was absolutely worth having.' Harvard made an offer, funded by John Milton Ward IV, a longtime music professor, and his wife, Ruth Neils Ward, and the collection began to make its way across the ocean to Cambridge, Mass.
It was a process that would take years. It wasn't until 2008 that Andrea Cawelti, the Ward music cataloger at the Houghton Library at Harvard, opened a box that would change things for Edmond Dédé.
Inside, she found the two hulking books of 'Morgiane.'
CAWELTI EASILY COULD have missed the significance of this moment. She had a mountain of scores to catalog and she had never heard of Dédé. But the lengthy manuscript, filled with handwriting that seemed to belong to the composer, stopped her. She took a moment to look him up, finding a broad sketch of his life in an encyclopedia.
'I immediately thought, Oh, wow,' Cawelti said, 'this is something special.'
A year earlier, she had attended a conference that included a talk about Black opera in 19th-century New Orleans — its vibrant scene, its musical importance, and its connection to what was coming next in the city: jazz. Now, she felt as if she was holding in her hands a tangible connection to that past: Dédé's opera.
'I was honestly thrilled,' Cawelti said, 'because I've made it my life's work to discover things and get them out into the world.' And she knew what had to happen next: This score needed to be digitized. 'I wanted to get this information out there.'
WORD OF CAWELTI'S EPIC find soon began to spread. Around 2011, McKee, the history professor, viewed the manuscript at Harvard. She documented its existence in her book about Dédé, 'The Exile's Song' (2017). At about the same time Cawelti's digital copy found its way to New Orleans, and into the hands of Givonna Joseph.
Joseph, a New Orleans native and a singer, had just started a new opera company in her hometown, OperaCréole, with the help of her daughter, Aria Mason. They were intent on giving Black musicians a chance to perform opera, as they had long ago in New Orleans. Joseph knew of Dédé and now she hoped to bring 'Morgiane' to the stage.
But transcribing Dédé's manuscript could cost more than $50,000 — an impossible sum for her small production company — and Joseph couldn't convince moneyed benefactors to help her bring an unfamiliar work from a forgotten Black musician to the stage.
'It's difficult when something is unknown,' Joseph said. 'You don't know what it sounds like. You don't know if people are going to actually show up to see it. It's a gamble.'
But Joseph refused to let it go. She kept talking about the opera, and finally got a break.
PATRICK DUPRE QUIGLEY, a New Orleans native, conductor and longtime musician, spent the Covid shutdown the way many people did: unable to work. Concert halls were closed, performances canceled. Quigley had time on his hands, and he filled it by reading music history at his home in Washington, D.C. Sometime around early 2021, he found Trotter's book about 'remarkable musicians of the colored race.' Quigley could barely believe what he was reading.
'I was sort of gobsmacked,' he said, 'at the robustness of Black participation in classical music in the 19th century, particularly in the United States, and specifically in New Orleans.' Quigley was especially stunned to read about one man: Edmond Dédé. 'It felt like a part of American musical history had been kept from me.'
Quigley began to chase Dédé's ghost. He found McKee's book. He found Cawelti's digitized manuscript. He found support at Opera Lafayette, a Washington company that hired him in 2023 as the artistic director designate. And he found Givonna Joseph, calling her one day that summer with a proposal: Maybe the Opera Lafayette and OperaCréole could stage 'Morgiane' together.
'It was a heaven-sent phone call,' Joseph said. 'He and I just seemed to just click out of nowhere. We immediately developed a trust and I do believe it was divinely appointed — or, if you believe such a thing could happen, that Edmond Dédé has been pulling the strings from the other side of the veil.'
The work, in the past 18 months, has been both painstaking and costly. They have had to transcribe the entire manuscript; make thousands of choices about hard-to-read notes, changes, erasures and blemishes; decide what to do when Dédé's manuscript calls for an instrument that modern orchestras no longer use, like the ophicleide; find donors to make it all possible; and push through doubt.
Quigley admits that questions have consumed him, at times. Is he the right person for this job? Is this note an A or an A flat? Is he even qualified to make that call?
'I'm not a Dédé scholar,' Quigley said.
But Joseph assured him again and again that it didn't matter. He's a Dédé scholar now. They all are. 'Dédé is working today,' Joseph likes to say. He is with them, she believes, and at the end of the first week of stripped-down rehearsals in Cincinnati, Quigley and Joseph realized that maybe they didn't need to doubt anymore.
The music sounded great and the voices of the singers filled the room with soaring emotion.
'It's a winner,' Quigley told Joseph afterward. 'It's a good show.'
No, Joseph corrected him. 'It's amazing.'