DÉDÉ'S "MORGIANE:" An Opera Demands to be Heard
I’ve always been drawn to the neglected in the arts, especially music. Divining the saga behind music worthy of discovery that has gone unheard somehow, as though it never existed, both outrages and fascinates me.
Needless to say, too frequently this art of neglect turns out to be by artists of color, or women, or both.
That is how and why I came to be in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall on a recent Wednesday night to see and hear an unknown opera written by a Black composer from 19th Century New Orleans (and, ultimately, Paris), named Edmond Dédé.
I confess I had never heard of Dédé, but here’s what I quickly learned: Born in 1827, he was a Creole-born “free person of color” (4th generation), which afforded him in New Orleans, among other privileges, elite musical training. At a young age it became clear that he was a prodigy on the violin. He soon began composing his own music, which further gained him a following. In 1854, though, new “Black codes” in New Orleans stripped the rights from free people of color. Dédé fled the city the following year, emigrating to France, where, too old to enroll at the Paris Conservatoire de Musique, he audited classes and took private lessons with premiere instructors of composition. He wound up working as a pianist, conductor, and composer at various theaters and music halls around Bordeaux, living out his life in exile. He wrote over 200 works, many of them well-received; ballets, operettas, symphonic and popular music. His magnum opus, however, a four-act “grand opera,” Morgiane, ou, Le Sultan d’Ispahan was never mounted.
Dédé’s handwritten Morgiane manuscript (for a 75-person orchestra) was presumed lost after his death in Paris in 1901, only to be unearthed in 2010 quite unexpectedly in a music collection bequeathed to the Harvard Memorial Library. Opera Lafayette — a small, scholarly Washington D.C. company devoted to giving little-heard works from the 17th-19th Centuries a second chance — collaborated with OperaCréole — a similarly dedicated New Orleans-based entity focused on composers of African descent — to bring Morgiane to the stage. Their joint labor was mighty. The results justified the effort.
Morgiane’s lush, melodic score held me in its thrall for over three hours. Dédé’s orchestral architecture seemed masterful, to me, an edifice of operatic richness and texture that moved me to rue the silence that has enveloped it all these years. Echoes of 19th Century French opera composers (Offenbach, Massenet, even Bizet) and Italian (Verdi, for sure) permeate Dédé’s music, lovely echoes, underlaid with tantalizing touches of New Orleans brass band tradition. Jazz, of course is absent entirely because, in Dédé’s time, jazz had not yet been invented. Still, I found myself thinking of Jelly Roll Morton — the hyperbolically self-avowed “inventor of jazz” — swinging out Verdi’s “Miserere” from Il Trovatore on a piano at the Library of Congress in 1938 after proclaiming that, as a Creole himself growing up in New Orleans, opera had been a big part of his musical childhood. Suddenly, I had before me the opera of a black New Orleans-born composer, pre-dating Jelly, that gave these proclamations substance and sound.
The production, elaborately costumed and minimally concert-staged, did Dédé and Morgiane proud. Patrick Dupre Quigley, Artistic Director Designate of Opera Lafayette, conducted with sweep and sensitivity, nurturing every note and color from Dédé’s mellifluous orchestrations, leading an excellent 50-person orchestra. The company of singers assembled was vividly attuned to the work. Soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, as the title character — majestic and heart-breaking as the opera itself — opened up with a powerhouse fourth act aria that seemed a summation of Dédé’s own journey. Soprano Nicole Cabell, as the about-to-be-wed bride, Amine, stolen by a love-besotted Sultan, sang with resonant outrage and virtuosic musicality. Baritone Joshua Conyers, as Morgiane’s steadfast husband, delivered a literally supporting role elegantly, while tenor Chauncey Packer, as the bereft groom, glowingly sang of his desperate love and frustration. Bass-Baritone Jonathan Woody was perfectly ominous as the Sultan’s flunky and fixer, while, as his boss, basso Kenneth Kellogg, was vocally virile and muscular. Yet, he also delivered with vulnerability some of Dédé’s most captivating writing — the Sultan’s open-hearted admission of his love.
What Morgiane’s lacks is a cogent libretto. Derived from The Arabian Nights, the plot is laughably convoluted, though one could also say operatically convoluted — no more or less dramatically incoherent than many well-known grand operas. Morgiane’s credited author, one Louis Brunet, has eluded all efforts by both opera companies, thus far, to identify him; he remains even more anonymous than Dédé himself, which left me to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t Dédé himself, writing under a pseudonym. It’s hard to imagine a composer of such exacting standards accepting such a rickety book from any other collaborator.
Morgiane, nevertheless, stays with me. “Defying harsh laws, braving even death, I was able to change my fate,” Morgiane herself sings at one point, certainly sounding like Dédé on Dédé. I hope his opera, after perhaps a dramaturgic touch-up, enters the repertoire. Edmond Dédé and Morgiane both deserve to be remembered.