Staging Race in Edmond Dédé’s “Morgiane”

Similar patterns would play out over Dédé’s long musical career: he prepared music for mass distribution, but often something stood in his way. Contemporary writers consistently referred to his skin color—much darker than other famous musicians of color in New Orleans, such as Victor Eugène Macarty and Samuel Snaër—and racial bias, both in the US and abroad, contributed to a lifetime of thwarted achievement.

Morgiane’s plot and composition reveal much about Dédé’s life and work, as well as his place among other composers of the time. His contemporary Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) has remained one of the world’s most popular operas in part because of its variety of dance rhythms and catchy tunes known by their Spanish names, such as the habanera and the seguidilla.

In Morgiane, similar stylistic expressions of the exotic—the “other”—may also relate to Dédé’s own biography and identity.  Were the Cuban habanera and the calypso (a dance that was just emerging in the Caribbean as he was composing Morgiane) reminiscent of the songs Dédé heard growing up in New Orleans? Did he deliberately incorporate the music of his youth into Morgiane to strengthen the notion of the other as he created a non-European atmosphere for a work composed in Bordeaux, France?

When Dédé settled in Bordeaux in 1859, he held the position of second conductor of the ballet orchestra at the Grand Théâtre, where his seat as a violinist placed him in sight of a fresco on the ceiling that celebrated Bordeaux’s role in the slave trade. He soon left that position and entered the city’s popular music scene, where he worked in venues such as the Théâtre l'Alcazar and Folies Bordelaises. Between 1870 and 1890, Dédé published a significant number of songs and dances in the popular styles of these cafés concert, and comparable pieces figure prominently in Morgiane.

Moving from the imposing formality of the Grand Théâtre to the more relaxed atmosphere of the cafés concert cannot have been an ideal lot for Dédé as a composer or a conductor—his talent enabled him to achieve, but something intervened in his greater success at every venture. This framework helps explain why he decided to spend the time and effort in composing a grand opera. We need only look at the plot of Morgiane to find answers, beginning with alterations to the titular character. Morgiane comes from Morgiana, a character in the Arabian Nights, and plays a major part in the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. Even though she saves the day in every version of the tale in which she appears, she is enslaved. In Morgiane, however, she is not. Dédé and his librettist, Louis Brunet, were both members of l’Institute d’Afrique, an organization devoted to abolition: that the main character in their opera is free is not surprising.

The opera delves deeper, however, into the question of belonging. In European exotic opera, the Arab characters typically represent the self—they align with the European audience. They are presented as admirable and virtuous, while the Persians—the other—are the opposite. However, in Morgiane, the matriarch is a member of an Arab family but is later revealed to be Persian: What we thought was the self is also the other.

As a man who constantly faced the society in which he moved as other—a free but dark-skinned man in New Orleans; a talented musician who incessantly searched for his place in Mexico City, Antwerp, London, Algiers, Lisbon, Marseilles, Rouen, Bourges, Angers, and Paris; a trained composer who essentially published pop songs—Dédé manipulated the narrative arc of his grandest achievement to make a point about dual consciousness. If Morgiane, a protagonist, actually belongs to the other, where does that leave any of us? And where does it place Dédé?

Ultimately, contemporary European audiences never got the chance to consider Dédé’s statement on self and other. Nineteenth-century France was a notoriously difficult place to get a new opera performed, meaning that it would be naive to assume that the only reason the Grand Théâtre’s director refused to mount Morgiane was a prejudice against its Black creator. Regardless of why, Dédé’s attempt to show the people of Bordeaux that race need not be a defining or confining characteristic was ignored in his lifetime. With this first performance in New Orleans, it comes to light at last.