Edmond Dédé

Edmond Dédé was born on the twentieth of November 1827 at the Marigny faubourg of New Orleans, the son of François Dédé — a free-Black bandmaster of Saint-Domingue origin who had emigrated to Louisiana in 1809 in the wake of the Haitian Revolution — and Marie-Anne Dédé. The household was free-Black Catholic, French-speaking, and musical: the father directed the militia band of the New Orleans free-coloured battalion.

He was placed at twelve under the violin tuition of the German émigré Constantin Debergue and at sixteen under the Belgian composer Eugène Prévost — then resident at New Orleans as conductor of the Théâtre d’Orléans. He took the brief option of the New Orleans free-Black artisanship community and apprenticed to a cigar-maker at twenty-one, but kept the violin.

He quit Louisiana for France in 1857 — the racial ordinances of the antebellum decade made the violinist career impossible in his birth city — and was admitted in 1858 to the Conservatoire de Paris under the violinist Jean-Delphin Alard. He took the prize for composition under Fromental Halévy in 1861.

He was named in 1864 conductor of the Orchestre de l’Alcazar at Bordeaux — the principal municipal orchestra of the south-west of France — and held the position for twenty-seven years from 1864 to 1891. He composed over two hundred and fifty works during the Bordeaux tenure — ballets, operettas, symphonies, salon pieces — among them the ballet Le palmier overture (1865) and the four-act opera Sultan d’Ispahan (1887).

He returned to New Orleans only once, in 1893, for a concert tour during which his trunk of manuscripts was lost in a Galveston shipwreck — irrecoverable losses to his catalogue.

He died at Paris on the fifth of January 1901, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the first Black composer to lead a French municipal orchestra.