Chauncey Packer, Jonathan Woody, Taylor White, and Joshua Conyers in a performance of excerpts of Morgiane in New Orleans on 3 February 2025 (Amber Johnson, HNOC)

It’s not often that you can hear the world premiere of a 19th-century opera. But this is exactly what Opera Lafayette and OperaCréole have in the works with Morgiane ou le Sultan d’Ispahan, a four-act grand opera composed by Edmond Dédé in 1887. Never performed during his lifetime, Morgiane is thought to be the earliest extant opera by a Black American composer.

Opera Lafayette’s artistic director designate, Patrick Dupre Quigley, will conduct the first full performance of Morgiane in Washington, DC on 3 February. (A preview of excerpts was presented in New Orleans last week). Quigley and OperaCréole founder and artistic director Givonna Joseph partnered to lead Morgiane’s resurrection from the archives. Co-founded by Joseph and her daughter Aria Mason in 2011, OperaCréole specializes in the research and performance of works by 19th-century free composers of color from New Orleans.

Lost after Dédé’s death, Morgiane’s 550-page handwritten score was rediscovered in the library collections of Harvard University about 15 years ago. The opera recounts a story loosely inspired by Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, though unlike in the original story, the character of Morgiane is not enslaved in Dédé’s version. The Persian forces of the Sultan of Ispahan, commanded by Beher, have kidnapped a young woman, Amine, on her wedding day. Her fiancé, Ali; her mother, Morgiane; and her stepfather, Haggi Hassan, set off to her rescue. Morgiane ingeniously saves the day in a dramatic twist that I won’t spoil for those planning to see the premiere.

Morgiane is radical for its time. Drawing on operatic conventions, it challenges norms of the discipline. Musicologist Candace Bailey, author of the forthcoming publication Edmond Dédé: “Morgiane, ou, Le Sultan d’Ispahan from Cambridge University Press, places Dédé’s work within the framework of French grand opera. She explained that it eschews the dry recitative permitted in the context of the opéra comique in favor of the more prestigious sung-through style while in lieu of discrete monologues, Morgiane consists of shorter segments of recitative and songs that may be considered arias, typical of 19th-century French opera.

Edmond Dédé

Though written in the form of a French grand opera in four acts, Morgiane’s music reveals the influence of other musical styles. “It defies genre,” said Bailey. “It defies the standard of what was happening in France in the 1880s.” While billed as a grand opera, Morgiane was written long after the heyday of works like those of Giacomo Meyerbeer graced Paris stages, and the music differs from the template. Dédé made a living writing popular music, such as for the music hall venue known as the café-concert, the influence of which Bailey said can be heard in Morgiane. His opera has humor similar to operetta, yet decidedly does not hail from that genre. Bailey also considers Morgiane’s work as distinct from the music of his French contemporaries, Jules Massenet and Camille Saint-Saëns.

Morgiane is “unbelievably virtuosic music,” Quigley said, citing the demands it places on the singers. Not only does Morgiane require large vocal ranges from performers, it also needs both bel canto-style coloratura and the vocal power of post-Wagner Romantic music, he stated. The opera also offers challenging parts for cello and viola, an orchestration that Bailey attributes to Dédé’s training as a string player. The music of the Caribbean was also an influence for Morgiane, further setting Dédé’s opera apart on a sonic level from works by his peers in France. Bailey cited an Act I divertissement ballet which transitions from a sequence in A minor to a calypso rhythm, as a prominent example. The creative team made some cuts to the score for the world premiere of Morgiane, which will be presented in concert format with one intermission. Ballet being de rigueur for French grand opera, Dédé included two in Morgiane, and both have been cut for this production.

While Morgiane may observe the basic structure of French grand opera, it is innovative in its approach to its subject matter. The libretto is distinct from contemporary works, Bailey argued, in how it appropriates the operatic tradition of French exoticism of works like Carmen or Lakmé.

In the beginning, Morgiane establishes Arabs as the protagonists and Persians as the antagonists, yet this apparent racial divide is complicated by the events of the fourth Act, which reveal initial notions about the characters and race to be false. “Where does this leave us in judging people based on race?” Bailey ponders, observing that Dédé and librettist Louis Brunet “are bringing their own experiences to the question at the heart of the opera.” And while Brunet himself left behind scant historical trace beyond possible membership in the Institut d’Afrique, an abolitionist organization for men of African descent to which Dédé also belonged, his libretto does use the word “race” (the same word in French as in English).

Mary Elizabeth Williams in a performance of excerpts of Morgiane in New Orleans on 3 February 2025 (Amber Johnson, HNOC)

Ultimately, Morgiane interrogates the audience’s beliefs about race and classifying people based on race. Seen through a 21st-century lens, Morgiane may appear to come out of a European artistic tradition that traffics in stereotypes about North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but the work is complex. As a Black man in 19th-century France, Dédé himself was a marginalized “Other,” which is reflected in Morgiane. The opera recounts characters resisting subjugation. Dédé traveled to Algeria as the French colonial project was underway, and his song “Le Serment de l’Arabe,” (not part of Morgiane) can, according to Joseph, be seen as a statement of solidarity with Arabs during the French conquest.

Dédé was born in 1827 to a free family of color in New Orleans, where he studied music and began his career but faced racial oppression. Far from the “desert” evoked by Giacomo Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut, New Orleans was the epicenter of opera in North America in the early 19th century. Long before the founding of the Met, New Orleans set the tone for opera in the United States. According to Quigley, a native of the city, white, enslaved, and free Black audiences attended the same venues but sat in segregated sections since the first opera recorded to have been performed in New Orleans, André Ernest Grétry’s Sylvain, in 1796.

In search of opportunities denied to him in New Orleans due to racism, Dédé left for France in 1855, not long after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act put free people of color at greater risk of being abducted into slavery. He studied at the prestigious Conservatoire de Musique in Paris and eventually found a home in Bordeaux, where he had a successful music career. He first found a position as a composer and accompanist for ballet at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux before moving to the Alcazar (a café-concert venue) and the Folies Bordelaises. According to a program note by Dédé biographer Sally McKee, the composer’s œuvre includes symphonic works, ballet interludes, and over 250 songs, in addition to Morgiane, his only opera. Dédé died in Paris in 1901.

The surviving historical record does not explicitly make clear why Dédé’s opera was never performed during his lifetime, but Joseph pointed to changes in the administration of the opera in Bordeaux and a glass ceiling due to his race. Dédé’s French contemporaries may have been more willing to accept him as a composer of popular music than of grand opera. “It’s just such an honor to be able to not only restore Dédé’s voice back to the operatic stage, but in a real way, give it the premiere it would not have gotten in its time,” Mason said, noting that she thought it was unlikely that a contemporaneous premiere of Morgiane would have been met with the same degree of respect as today. “This way, it will be heard from people who can celebrate his color and his background but also celebrate his talent rather than using one to decry the other.”

Patrick Dupre Quigley and Givonna Joseph (Robert Peccola)

Opera Lafayette and OperaCréole present the world premiere of Morgiane amid an ongoing conversation in the opera world about broadening the repertory and making a historically white and male discipline more inclusive and representative. Since its founding, OperaCréole has pioneered the rediscovery of operas by composers of African descent that are thought lost or rarely performed. Morgiane is just one example. In 2017, the company gave the US premiere of La Flamenca, a lost opera by Lucien Lambert, another of the 19th-century free composers of color from New Orleans known as the Creole Romantics.

“Really what we’re doing is restorative justice for those people who had a presence in the opera world in their day and have been lost to history,” Joseph said. Today’s standard repertory may predominantly consist of white composers, but the history of the discipline is not exclusively white. As OperaCréole’s groundbreaking work highlights, composers of color have written operas for decades, many contemporary with classics of the genre. It’s past time that their contributions be recognized.

Some have proposed deepening commitments to new works as a path forward for opera. As Morgiane demonstrates, this isn’t the only way to expand the canon. Joseph’s commitment to “restorative justice” in opera offers an alternative to the warhorses that most frequently occupy the stages of opera houses around the world. How many other historical works, particularly by marginalized composers, have been lost, forgotten, or neglected?

Both OperaCréole and Opera Lafayette focus on the resurrection of older works by composers who are often under-recognized. Opera Lafayette, which specializes in 17^th and 18^th century French repertoire, has given world premieres of historical works, most recently Jean-Philippe Rameau’s unfinished opera Io in May 2023, as well as modern premieres of works not played in centuries. Contemporary works can be polarizing with some audiences. Productions of under-appreciated historical works allow companies to expand the canon in a way that will be sonically distinct from works being composed today.

Operas by contemporary composers have an important role in ensuring a sustainable future for the art form, but so do overlooked historical works of the type championed by OperaCréole and Opera Lafayette. Opera companies developing future seasons might wish to look to the example of the Morgiane world premiere as a way to refresh a static (and for some, arguably stagnant) operatic canon with works by composers who were unjustifiably overlooked in their time.

This may be the first production of Dédé’s opera, but the creative team does not want it to be the last. Joseph advocates the production of Morgiane as “transformational justice in opera,” adding that “we want it to go out and become part of the opera canon and to have these composers make a new dent in what is considered opera.” The creative team plans to release a performance score and a recording.

The process of bringing Morgiane to its premiere began in earnest in 2023 with the transcription and editing of Dédé’s score which involved converting the manuscript into orchestral and vocal scores in modern notation (as well as a piano reduction) from the often messy handwritten manuscript, the only document in which the opera survives. In a process that Quigley likened to “playing telephone across centuries,” the creative team had to interpret ambiguity in the score’s handwriting and use of shorthand and make educated guesses to develop a performable version. They also had to modernize the 19th-century score that uses outdated soprano and tenor clefs. It’s also thought that Dédé did not have a workshop of the full orchestral score, leaving the creative team to figure out wrong notes and make any emendations as necessary.

Patrick Dupre Quigley in a performance of excerpts of Morgiane in New Orleans on 3 February 2025 (Amber Johnson, HNOC)

Opera Lafayette’s productions are known for their use of the period instruments for which the composer wrote them, and the company has continued this approach for Morgiane, which falls later than most of the company’s typical repertory.Dating to 1887, Dédé’s work is the latest-composed full opera performed by Opera Lafayette. Audiences can expect a strings section with gut, rather than steel, strings and the use of the ophicleide, a 19th-century brass instrument for which Dédé wrote. (It preceded the tuba.)

Some may be puzzled by the choice to use period instruments for an opera composed the same year as Otello: “Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, instruments generally become closer to what people are familiar with as ‘modern’ instruments,” Opera Lafayette founder and artistic director Ryan Brown explained, “though there are still significant differences such as the gut strings and the horn players’ use of their hand rather than valves.” Brown noted that these differences will produce different colors from the orchestra, yet another way of making a new score sound truly new. “The timbral difference between this orchestra versus a modern orchestra playing 19th-century music is vast,” Quigley said.

The Morgiane world premiere cast includes soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams as the titular character, bass Kenneth Kellogg as Sultan Kourouschah, baritone Joshua Conyers as Haggi Hassan, tenor Chauncey Packer as Ali, soprano Nicole Cabell as Amine (the role was sung by Taylor White in the New Orleans preview), and Woody as Beher. The cast will also include featured artists and chorus from OperaCréole. Morgiane will be performed on 3 February at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC; 5 February at Lincoln Center in New York; and 7 February at the University of Maryland Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park, MD.