10: The Premières of Edmond Dédé's Morgiane in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

A personal perspective.

(screen grab from Washington Classical Review)

I wrote a The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World, which appeared in print in 2017. Born in New Orleans in 1827, Dédé emigrated to France in 1855, worked for over three decades as a conductor and music director in Bordeaux, and died in Paris in 1901.¹ A freeborn Black man, he grew up in New Orleans’s large, cohesive free community of color in the early nineteenth century. In the face of rejection, antagonism, oppression, and violence (both active and threatened), African Americans either adjusted their ambitions to fit the realities of nineteenth-century America, or they relinquished them. Dédé successfully fought to accomplish what practically no other person of color managed to achieve in that time. He forged a career and sense of self entirely on his own terms.

Very nearly all the African Americans living in the nineteenth century whose names we are still familiar with today were orators, activists, soldiers, or resisters against slavery and the racist institutions and norms of the United States before and after the Civil War. Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Dubois, are the best known among them. They all devoted their lives to winning a fight that has still not been won.

At first glance, Edmond Dédé’s name does not belong in that list. There is no evidence that shows he ever engaged directly in actions for social justice either in New Orleans or in France. Since he left the US six years before the Civil War began, the most we can assert is that he expressed to an American official in Bordeaux his pride in his brothers, who fought at the siege of Port Hudson in 1863 as enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army. We know, too, that when he returned to New Orleans for one short visit in late 1893, he had to confront the reality that his homeland was as violent and racist as ever. He soon returned heartbroken to France. Otherwise, Dédé spent his entire adult life earning a living by making and composing music.

These facts about his life are what make room for him on the list of nineteenth-century African American heroes. He is one of the exceedingly few African Americans who negotiated life his way, by becoming a professional and consistently employed musician in the extremely competitive music world of France, then considered the music capital of Europe. Consider the courage his journey had to have required. This dark-skinned son of the Crescent City, who could not have hidden his African ancestry even if he had wished to, obtained, first, the best music education in the European tradition available at the time and, second, steady employment in the professional environment of nineteenth-century France. To be sure, he could not have achieved that without the initial financial and moral support of his community in his hometown. Moreover, Dédé encountered color prejudice in France as vicious as anything he had experienced in New Orleans. It cannot be denied, however, that French society gave him room to maneuver that the US did not. Still, think of the psychic cost to him.

In the 1880s, while employed as music director at a succession of popular music halls in Bordeaux, he worked on composing a four-act grand opera, which at first he entitled “Le sultan d’Ispahan,” and later changed to “Morgiane, ou le sultan d’Ispahan.” He meant it to be his masterpiece. Unfortunately, he never found an impresario to produce it and so his manuscript languished among his papers until he died. The one manuscript score disappeared.

It re-surfaced in a library at Harvard in 2010.² A further twelve years passed before two opera companies joined forces and raised the funds to stage Dédé’s opera.³ Patrick Dupre Quigley, music director and conductor of the Washington, D.C-based Opera Lafayette, and Givonna Joseph, founder and director of Opera Créole in New Orleans, both natives of New Orleans, brought Dédé’s opera alive. They organized three premières of Dédé’s opera. The first one rightfully took place the Cathedral of St Louis (where Dédé was baptized) in New Orleans on January 23, 2025. The second was staged at The Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. on February 3, 2025, which I attended. The final performance took place at Jazz at Lincoln Center on February 5.

A snow storm prevented me from flying to New Orleans for the performance in the cathedral. Defeated by southern snow, I booked a new flight to Washington, D.C. for the Feb 3 performance. The event surpassed my expectations. The theater was full. The singers compelling. The orchestra responded to Quigley’s sensitive and rigorous interpretation of the opera score and libretto he transferred from the manuscript folios to printed sheet music. Above all, watching and listening to the music brought Dédé alive to me in a way I had not previously experienced him. Despite knowing him as well as anyone can, I could visualize him conducting his own production and sensed what he was trying to achieve. However, since I’m not a musicologist, all I can convey here are those impressions.

Aside from appreciating the beauty in the music, the most moving moment of the evening for me was meeting Edmond Dédé’s great-great-grandson, Jean-Marie Schevin. Prior to a year ago, I had no idea that Dédé had descendants because, of the two children his son had by the wife I knew about, one died very young and the other died childless. That was the end of the line as far as I knew.

Now, I’m going to wade into the weeds. As I mentioned, my book appeared in 2017. In 2019, one month before the lock-down began, I was in the Archives de Paris looking for the will of Dédé’s widow, Sylvie Leflet, which might have answered some lingering questions I had. I did not find Sylvie’s will. Instead, I found the will of Dédé’s son, Eugène Arcade Pierre, who died on August 26, 1919 in Paris.⁴ His will was not made public until 2019, which explains why I could not include its contents in my book. So, it came as a shock to me to learn from his will that Dédé’s son had two sons from a second marriage. When I say shock, I mean, when I read the will, I lost track of the time and my surroundings. Edmond Dédé had descendants!

Subsequently, I learned that Jean-Marie Schevin was in touch with Givonna Joseph and with the descendants of Edmond Dédé’s brothers in Louisiana. And he was there at the performance in DC. He is so young! We met in the crush of the intermission. I had to touch his hand. My French failed me. He seemed shy. Maybe I’m imagining it, but, eye to eye, we recognized each other. A crowd of people surrounded us, so we could not talk. But his immensely patient fiancée made sure we exchanged contact information. He and I will talk one day.

1. My book is now print-to-order at an unafforable price. But used copies are also available online.

2. An account of Dédé, his opera, and how the manuscript was found can be read in this NYT article (should be a gift link).

3. The Music Department of UC Davis generously devoted time and money to the transcription and public performance of three arias from the opera on November 16, 2017.

4. The will raises more questions than are worth going into here, especially about his son’s name. Archives de Paris, serie D.Q7, 39134, mag 33.