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

Almost 125 years after Edmond Dédé’s death, his magnum opus “Morgiane,” perhaps the oldest existing opera by a Black American, is to be staged for the first time.

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.