by Patrick D. McCoy
Published January 27, 2025
Dédé’s Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan, from 1887, is perhaps the oldest known complete opera by an African-American composer
Hidden away for 138 years, the world premiere production of ‘Morgiane’ is a partnership between OperaCreole and Opera Lafayette
Like many artists of color with the opportunity, Edmond Dédé fled the antebellum United States. After a time in Mexico, he eventually settled in France, where his talents as a composer and conductor were soon recognized, somewhat celebrated, and later forgotten. Among Dédé’s surviving works is a four-act opera, Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan, which was never performed or published in his lifetime.
Morgiane, a happy-ending tale inspired by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, was finished in 1887, making it perhaps the oldest-known complete opera by a Black composer born in the United States. (Before the discovery of Morgiane, the oldest-known work by an African-American opera composer was attributed to Harry Lawrence Freeman’s 1893 The Martyr. Even earlier is John Thomas Douglass’ 1868 opera Virginia’s Ball, although that work is now lost.)
Next week, Morgiane will receive its world premiere, fully staged, with shows in the Washington D.C. area (Feb. 3 and 7) and New York City (Feb. 5). It’s a co-production of the D.C.-based Opera Lafayette and OperaCreole from New Orleans. Patrick Dupré Quigley, artistic director-designate of Opera Lafayette, will conduct. (Sections of the opera have been workshopped in various cities; a 90-minute excerpt was performed last week in New Orleans.)
The premiere has been a decade in the making. “I knew it was my mission to get this done,” recalls Givonna Joseph, co-founder of OperaCreole, after receiving a digital file of the opera in 2014. “The world needed to know that a free Black man from New Orleans not only composed over 100 works, but also a complete French grand opera with a ballet and an extra brass section. It was never performed, so I was set on a path for restorative and transformational justice.”
Not long after, conductor Quigley was investigating musicians of color from New Orleans and happened upon that same digitized, 550-page manuscript, which had been crammed into another composer’s score, part of a large private collection from France that ended up in Harvard’s Houghton Library. The full opera is now online and available for public view. To help celebrate these premiere performances, the actual manuscript is on view at D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library through March 2nd.
Thinking about an eventual performance, Quigley and Opera Lafayette founder Ryan Brown checked if anyone else was working on the project. They quickly found Joseph and her daughter, Aria Mason, who co-founded OperaCreole in 2011 with the mission to “give voice and life to the music of classical and operatic composers of African descent, particularly from New Orleans.” Opera Lafayette’s mission is to revive or introduce operas from the 17th through the 19th century, especially in French. It was a double jackpot: Morgiane checked every box for both companies.
And they’d all worked with a singer in common, bass-baritone (and noted composer) Jonathan Woody, who introduced them in a Zoom call in 2023. They quickly decided to collaborate. First up was transcribing and editing the handwritten manuscript, which was done by Quigley and partly funded by the French consulate in New Orleans.
French Opera Meets New Orleans Tunes
Much of what’s known about the composer comes from scholarship by Candance Bailey and by Sally McKee, author of The Exile’s Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World. He was born in 1827 in New Orleans, when the city was the center of opera in America, and was educated by visiting European musicians on clarinet and violin. He was locally celebrated as a skilled violinist and composer. His earliest published music straddled the line between art song and popular tunes — an attractive mix that Joseph has called “an early version of the blues.”
By the late 1850s he studied briefly at the Paris Conservatoire and built a career in Bordeaux, where he worked as a repetiteur, violinist, and assistant conductor at the prestigious Grand Théâtre. Within a few years, he moved to the city’s popular-entertainment Théâtre l’Alcazar and Les Folies Bordelaises. Most of Dédé’s published works are in single-song sheet music format, pulled from his operettas and popular shows (not so different from a hit song extracted from a forgotten Broadway musical).
Decades later, with Morgiane, he seemed to bring together his musical heritage: “People will be shocked that they’ve never heard of this composer,” says Quigley. “The vocal writing is virtuosic, the orchestration is unbelievably colorful. He was a string player, and you hear the inner voices, it’s masterful. He combines the tunefulness of what you think of from New Orleans with the prevailing French operatic forms of the time.”
Morgiane is through-composed — everything is sung and the orchestra plays the entire time, with no spoken dialogue — based on a mid-19th-century soundworld of Rossini and Meyerbeer, backed by a Romantic-era orchestra, what Quigley calls “pre-Wagnerian.” Following French tuning standards of the day, typically A = 435 – 440 range, these performance will be at 440. The score calls for bright, agile voices.
Its sensational plot, with a libretto by a still-obscure poet named Louis Brunet, taps the sort of “exotic” Middle Eastern locales then in vogue (think Aïda, Samson et Dalila, or Thaïs). A beautiful young woman on her wedding day is kidnapped by the evil henchman of the Persian Sultan. Her family crosses the desert from Arabia to Isfahan (in Persia) and infiltrates the Sultan’s court on the day he’s planning to marry the young woman. They have disguised themselves as itinerant singers. But moments before they’re about to rescue her, disaster! They are discovered, imprisoned, and condemned to death. Just before the execution, the mother of the young woman who’s been kidnapped — the title character, Morgiane, is the mother — speaks to the Sultan with a shocking revelation.
Spoiler alert: From under her cloak Morgiane pulls out a diamond ring, the very ring that he’d given her the day their daughter was born. “I was your sultana,” she says, reminding him that the next day she fled his palace to escape his cruelty and abuse. You can’t marry this young women, she says, because she is your daughter! The opera ends happily, with the Sultan releasing the prisoners and asking for forgiveness. All rejoice.
The composer’s creativity is heard throughout. The Sultan, for example, cuts a unique figure. Most of the characters sing in a familiar meter and four-bar structure, but the Sultan, the opera’s bad guy and “outsider,” sings in three- and seven-bar phrases and, instead of being accompanied by the strings, is backed by winds and horns.
New Orleans as America’s Opera Capital
In many ways, this is a full-circle moment. Like the composer, both Joseph and Quigley are New Orleans natives. “Opera is as crucial to New Orleans as jazz,” says Joseph. Speaking of the historic Italian Opera House and French Opera House in the city, she continues, “our history, starting in 1796, as an opera mecca has never truly been celebrated as it should be. It is so affirming to know that this music [opera] I have loved has always been a part of my people’s legacy. Dédé is one of many free classical composers and musicians of color in 19th-century New Orleans.”
For his part, Quigley says he was “taken aback at my own ignorance of just how early composers of color were an integral part of both American and European art music. In New Orleans alone, people of color were involved with the composition, performance, and production of opera from the late 18th century onward. Dédé comes from a vibrant artistic community of composers of color who have connections to 19th-century New Orleans. The Lambert Family (Charles Lucien Lambert, Sidney Lambert and Lucien-Leon Lambert), Eugene Victor McCarty, Basile Bares, as well as Eugene Dédé (Edmond’s son) are part of a tradition of music-making. Clearly, our timeline of American music must be updated to reflect the reality of who was composing music during the 19th century.”
Evans Mirages is artistic director of Cincinnati Opera, which helped workshop Morgiane in the spring of 2025, with additional support from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. “Foundation support has been key,” says Mirages of the workshop finances. “With some exceptions, individuals look to established funders for validation that a project has merit. The decade-plus support, for example, that Cincinnati Opera enjoyed from the Mellon Foundation for Opera Fusion: New Works and The Black Opera Project have been vital.” In Cincinnati Opera’s case, for the workshop, it helped “cultivate a growing group of funders who believe in the continuation of the art form. We all know the landscape is changing. Many foundations and corporate givers have shifted their focus away from institutional giving, but we hope that the momentum created by the historic and game-changing support of the past 12 years will be something we can translate to a group of individual donors going forward.”
“The Morgiane production is similar in its ambition,” Mirages continues. “Here is a composer, Edmond Dédé, one of many in his generation whose excellent music and keen dramatic sense will receive its long overdue opportunity to generate opinion and open the door to similar revivals.”
Indeed, similar revivals is the ultimate and hoped-for result. “Givonna Joseph warrants that Morgiane is just the tip of the iceberg in a catalog of music by Black composers awaiting the light of day,” says Mirages.
For now, says Quigley, there are plans to help ensure the success and longevity of Morgiane. Opera Lafayette will record the opera, and make the score and parts available to help the opera enter the repertoire. In addition, some of its most delectable music — the overture, the entr’actes, the ballet sequences, plus a few other numbers — would make a highly attractive orchestral suite.
With the Morgiane world premiere, we are hearing the first of this music, but it certainly won’t be the last time we hear Edmond Dédé’s music.
Patrick D. McCoy is a choral conductor, singer, and music journalist. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post among other publications. He currently serves as organist and choirmaster at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beltsville, Maryland.
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