*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Welcome to the BBC World Service & British Council International Audio Drama Competition 2026. To enter, you’ll need to complete the online submission form and supply us with: The script for your 40-50 minute audio drama with up to six central characters.
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Stonecoast Review now open for the Summer 2025 Issue (#23)
Theme: Power
What do you think of when you hear the word “power”? What does it mean to have power? What does it mean to use it? What does it mean to abuse it? How does it feel when it’s taken away?
The word connotes different definitions and bears different weights for each of us. It manifests itself in unexpected ways and settings, and remains absent or suppressed in so many others.
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Over a 5-year period, The Democracy Cycle – a collaboration between the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) and Civis Foundation (an affiliate of Galvan Initiatives) – will commission and develop a total of 25 new performing arts works across the fields of theater, dance, music, opera, and multi-disciplinary performance that express themes related to the nature and practice of democracy, particularly as it is practiced in the United States.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** MORGIANE ***
Because orchestras, opera houses, and festivals rely almost entirely on private funding, they ought to be in a position to resist Trump’s stabs at Stalinist control. The question, though, is whether even the slightest hint of trouble—a commission for a transgender composer that annoys a reactionary board member, a Latino-oriented series that receives closely monitored N.E.A. funding—will trigger what Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience. In more than a few cases, organizations seemingly launched diversity programs not out of a committed belief but out of a fear of being chastised on social media. Now fear could push them in the opposite direction. This dire moment in American history is forcing a test of character. As Thomas Mann said, in another fraught period, there is no escaping politics in the arts.
A couple of weeks after the Inauguration, I attended a concert performance of Edmond Dédé’s opera “Morgiane” at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, at the University of Maryland, just outside Washington. Dédé was a Black composer born in 1827 in New Orleans. In 1855, he immigrated to France, where he made his way as a composer and conductor. “Morgiane,” which he completed in 1887, was intended to be his breakthrough, but no one took it up. The score resurfaced in 2008, in the collections of Houghton Library, at Harvard. The Washington-based company Opera Lafayette and the New Orleans group OperaCréole came together to bring “Morgiane” to life; its first outing was at St. Louis Cathedral, in New Orleans, in January. “Morgiane” displays sufficient inspiration that it would have merited attention no matter who had composed it. With Dédé’s personal story in mind, the undertaking became essential.
More...
https://archive.ph/fJISE
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This year’s edition of Musical Louisiana presents the long-awaited world premiere of New Orleanian Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane (1887). This historic composition remains the earliest known surviving full-length opera written by a Black American composer. Lauded for works that transformed some of France’s most popular stages, Dédé packed a variety of musical genres into Morgiane, which has remained a hidden gem for over a century and yet to be heard—until now.
Morgiane tells a tale of vengeance, truth, and reconciliation that begins when a young couple’s wedding day is disrupted by the sultan’s desire for the bride. When the bride’s family seeks revenge, a shocking revelation comes to light, leading to a path of forgiveness.
https://hnoc.org/events/musical-louisiana-2025
This year’s edition of Musical Louisiana presents the long-awaited world premiere of New Orleanian Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane (1887). This historic composition remains the earliest known surviving full-length opera written by a Black American composer. Lauded for works that transformed some of France’s most popular stages, Dédé packed a variety of musical genres into Morgiane, which has remained a hidden gem for over a century and yet to be heard—until now.
Morgiane tells a tale of vengeance, truth, and reconciliation that begins when a young couple’s wedding day is disrupted by the sultan’s desire for the bride. When the bride’s family seeks revenge, a shocking revelation comes to light, leading to a path of forgiveness.
https://hnoc.org/events/musical-louisiana-2025
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Born in 1827, Dédé was part of the fourth generation of free persons of color in his French-speaking Creole family. His father, a clarinetist, encouraged his musical interests. Dédé excelled at the violin, and was considered a prodigy at an early age.
But like many people of color, he faced discrimination. He left for Mexico, returned home to work as a cigar roller, until the reality of Jim Crow laws made him quit the United States for good. Like other Black artists, Dédé fled to Europe, settling in France as the American Civil War loomed.
There, he was celebrated as he composed and conducted orchestral works, art songs, ballets and operettas. Dédé audited classes at the Paris Conservatoire and later served as an accompanist and composer at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux in southwestern France. He conducted in the city's popular music halls, among them the Alcazar and the Folies Bordelaises.
More...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-4868011/oldest-black-american-opera-premiere
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“He wanted to be a composer in the art music tradition,” Sally McKee, a retired historian at the University of California at Davis tells the publication. “He wanted to be like Mendelssohn. He wanted to be like Brahms.”
He came tantalizingly close to that goal when he finished Morgiane. It was a fantastical story of a young bride abducted by a villainous sultan, until the bride’s mother—the title character, Morgiane—reveals a shocking secret to help save her kidnapped daughter.
But Dédé never saw it performed. He died with little money a few years later and was buried in a communal grave in Paris. Few people understood—or even witnessed—his great work, bursting at the seams of two bound volumes.
More...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-of-the-oldest-surviving-operas-by-a-black-american-composer-will-be-performed-for-the-first-time-138-years-after-it-was-written-180985943/
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Dédé made notes in the margins of his “Morgiane” manuscript, crossed out entire pages, rewrote the music again and again, and changed its title. At first he called his opera “The Sultan of Ispahan,” after the villain of the story — a sultan who steals a young bride to have her for his own. But Dédé renamed it for a more sympathetic character: Morgiane, the bride’s mother, who goes off in search of her abducted daughter and serves up an unexpected twist in the end.
It was Dédé’s dream, McKee said, to have “Morgiane” performed. But it never happened. Dédé moved to Paris around 1889 and his star soon faded. By the time of his death, in 1901, his family seemingly didn’t even have money for a proper burial. Dédé ended up in a communal grave outside Paris, with no headstone or marker. And with his death, the manuscript for “Morgiane,” bound into two hulking volumes, did what many overlooked works tend to do.
It disappeared.
ALMOST A CENTURY LATER, in 1999, Lisa Cox, a dealer of antiquarian music based in England, got a phone call from a man who operated a music store in Paris. His name was Bernard Peyrotte and he was calling with some news.
Peyrotte and a French conductor, Jean-Marie Martin, had been collecting musical scores for half a century. Some dated back to the 1600s. There were nearly 10,000 in all, and Peyrotte had made a decision: He was selling.
“It was an incredible collection,” Cox said in an interview recently. Peyrotte and Martin didn’t just have operas by Verdi, Wagner and some of the biggest French composers of the 19th century; many of the scores had unique updates and variations, and some came from unexpected places, like modern-day Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. The collection was eclectic, rare, significant. And Cox knew who to call about purchasing it: Virginia Danielson, who was at the time the Richard F. French librarian at Harvard University’s Loeb Music Library.
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.
More...
https://archive.ph/g3AYv
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The opera’s overture sets the stage for the smorgasbord of melodic invention to come, a highly entertaining compression of key themes that traverses the work’s full gamut of emotional states and primes the start of Act I with a big oompah and cymbals and finishes in the mode of Carmen’s beloved overture. Quigley maintained a firm hold on the reins here to meet the band where they were, but it was easy to imagine how much this passage would cook in a polished reading.
The action proper begins with the first of the work’s many notable choruses, here the wedding guests for Ali and Amine singing a gentle hymn to the blessed day. The especially dense interplay between orchestra and chorus that will be a hallmark of the choral passages throughout the work is immediately evident, Dédé’s score making use of coloring in the orchestra to continually enrich the choral writing.
A series of numbers for the principals ensues to establish the plot’s central mystery: bride Amine learns that her father, Hagi Hassan, is not her biological father, but her mother Morgiane refuses to reveal the truth of her parentage.
More...
https://parterre.com/2025/02/05/and-her-mother-too/
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Edmond Dédé: Selections from the opera "Morgiane" and more...
A free-born native of New Orleans, Edmond Dédé (1827–1901) spent over four decades conducting orchestras in Bordeaux, France. His recently found but never-performed opera, Morgiane (1888), is the earliest full-length opera by an African American composer. UC Davis Professor of History Sally McKee, author of The Exile’s Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2017) will offer some remarks on the work’s significance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxrMJi0_4KQ
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