Joshua Conyers, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Chauncey Packer and Patrick Quigley. Jennifer Packard, Courtesy of Opera Lafayette

In Bordeaux in 1887, New Orleans-born composer Edmond Dédé finished an opera called Morgiane and, perhaps unknowingly, made history. His magnum opus is the oldest grand opera and the first known opera by a Black American composer. Sometime after Dédé set down his pen, the over-500-page manuscript for Morgiane disappeared for over a century, reappearing in Harvard’s library in 2011. Almost no one had heard it until last week.

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Morgiane is the product of painstaking reconstruction from Dédé’s manuscript through a collaboration by two opera companies, Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole. Getting this opera into performable shape after it languished in archives for over a century was no mean feat; it required skill, money and time. That’s why the work of music librarians, musicologists and projects like Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole are so essential in rediscovering lost works and getting them from page to stage. Here, all this labor yielded manifold returns. Morgiane is historically significant, musically viable and worthy of a full staging.

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