In fall 2000, Cox and Danielson traveled to Peyrotte’s house outside Paris, where they chatted over wine and cheese. Then Danielson spent a few hours there reviewing Peyrotte’s scores and quickly made a determination. “The collection,” she said, “was absolutely worth having.” Harvard made an offer, funded by John Milton Ward IV, a longtime music professor, and his wife, Ruth Neils Ward, and the collection began to make its way across the ocean to Cambridge, Mass.
It was a process that would take years. It wasn’t until 2008 that Andrea Cawelti, the Ward music cataloger at the Houghton Library at Harvard, opened a box that would change things for Edmond Dédé.
Inside, she found the two hulking books of “Morgiane.”
CAWELTI EASILY COULD have missed the significance of this moment. She had a mountain of scores to catalog and she had never heard of Dédé. But the lengthy manuscript, filled with handwriting that seemed to belong to the composer, stopped her. She took a moment to look him up, finding a broad sketch of his life in an encyclopedia.
“I immediately thought, Oh, wow,” Cawelti said, “this is something special.”
A year earlier, she had attended a conference that included a talk about Black opera in 19th-century New Orleans — its vibrant scene, its musical importance, and its connection to what was coming next in the city: jazz. Now, she felt as if she was holding in her hands a tangible connection to that past: Dédé’s opera.
“I was honestly thrilled,” Cawelti said, “because I’ve made it my life’s work to discover things and get them out into the world.” And she knew what had to happen next: This score needed to be digitized. “I wanted to get this information out there.”