Composer Edmond Dédé. Credit: Public domain

Edmond Dédé picked up a clarinet first, but his true calling was to become a violin prodigy, a composer and a conductor.

Opera singer Givonna Joseph, who founded Opera Creole, said Dédé was her first musical love. “His ‘Mon Pauvre Coeur’ was the first published work by a free man of color in New Orleans,” she said. “It’s just a beautiful piece. That was one of the first pieces I learned.”

Joseph discussed Dédé with interviewer Laine Kaplan-Levenson during “Edmond Dédé: The Classical Composer You’ve Never Heard Of,” a segment of WWNO’s “Tripod: New Orleans at 300.”

“Dédé didn’t just play music. He wrote it. A lot of it. And a lot of different kinds,” Kaplan-Levenson said in 2018. His work includes about six operas, five operettas, one opera comique and symphonies. “The thing is, to this day, none of his operas have ever been performed.”

Born in New Orleans in 1827, Dédé studied music here before moving to Mexico to escape racism in 1848. Returning home in 1851, Dédé wrote and published “Mon Pauvre Coeur” (My Poor Heart). According to Black Past, it is considered the oldest piece of sheet music published by a New Orleans free person of color.

In the late 1850s, Dédé started conducting France’s Theater of Bordeaux, where he stayed for 25 years. While traveling back to New Orleans in 1893, his ship sank. Dédé survived, but his favorite instrument was lost.

Once he was back in New Orleans, Dédé could perform only in Black churches. “Critics of the time said it was a shame Dédé couldn’t play in the concert halls. But whites flocked to his concerts in the churches anyway,” Kaplan-Levenson said. “​​It didn’t matter. Dédé was insulted, traumatized. He went home to France, and never returned.”

He died in Paris in 1903.

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...