Daron Hagen

Daron Hagen studied at Juilliard School, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Curtis Institute of Music. Gilda Lyons is recorded as having studied under Daron Hagen. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are opera. Employment is recorded with Bard College and Miami University. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

Daron Hagen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up in New Berlin, a suburb west of Milwaukee. Hagen was the youngest of the three sons of Gwen Hagen, a visual artist, writer and advertising executive who studied creative writing with Mari Sandoz and enjoyed a successful advertising career as creative director of Exclusively Yours Magazine and Earl Hagen (an attorney). Hagen began composing prolifically in 1974, when his older brother Kevin gave him a recording and score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he conducted the premiere of his first orchestral work, a recording and score of which came to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who enthusiastically urged Hagen to attend Juilliard to study with David Diamond. He studied piano with Adam Klescewski, and studied composition, piano, and conducting at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music (where his teachers included Duane Dishaw and Judy Kramer) while attending Brookfield Central High School.

After two years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his teachers included Catherine Comet (conducting), Jeanette Ross (piano), and Les Thimmig and Homer Lambrecht (composition), he was invited to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia by Ned Rorem (with whom he developed a lifelong friendship). While a student of Rorem's at Curtis, he studied piano with Marion Zarzeczna and also studied privately with Lukas Foss. Hagen moved to New York City in 1984 to complete his formal education as a student at Juilliard, studying first for two years with Diamond, then for a semester each with Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. After graduating, Hagen was a Tanglewood composition fellow before briefly living abroad, first at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and then at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, where he has twice been a guest. Between 1985 and 1998 Hagen was also a frequent guest at the MacDowell Colony. When he returned to the United States, Hagen studied privately with Bernstein, whose guidance during the composition of Hagen's Shining Brow (1992) — the opera that launched Hagen's career internationally — prompted him to dedicate the score to Bernstein's memory.

As artistic director of the Perpetuum Mobile Concerts (1982–87) he premiered compositions by over a hundred American composers on concerts produced in Philadelphia and New York. Hagen served as president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation (2004–07) in New York City, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the performance and creation of opera and art song; from 2000 to 2018 he served as a trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera and was elected a lifetime member of the Corporation of Yaddo in 2006. He is the founding artistic director of the New Mercury Collective, "a laboratory for artistic exploration, creative risk-taking, and performance in which its members can collaborate on the creation and performance of post-genre works combining theater, music, and emerging technology for audiences of all types." Hagen has been a featured composer at the Tanglewood, Mostly Modern, Ravinia, Wintergreen, and Aspen music festivals, and has served as artistic director and head of faculty for the Seasons Fall Music Festival in Yakima, Washington (2008–2012). He served as co-chair of Composition for the Wintergreen Summer Music Academy in Virginia (2015-2025). Faculty appointments include a stint as composer in residence at the Music Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts that led to an invitation to join the artist faculty there (2017–2023) "in a multi-disciplinary position created for him that enable[d] him to share his skills as a stage director, dramaturge, composer, and social activist with students from throughout the Roosevelt University community as they shadowed him and collaborate in the development of a new Hagen opera each year." He has also served as the Franz Lehár Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh (2007), twice as composer in residence for the Princeton University Atelier (1998, 2004–5); as artist in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2000–2002); Sigma Chi-William P. Huffman Composer in Residence at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (1999–2000); artist in residence at Baylor University, Waco, Texas (1998–1999); on the musical studies faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music (1996–1998); as an associate professor at Bard College (1988–1997); as a visiting professor at the City College of New York (1997, 1993–1994); and as a lecturer in music at New York University (1988–1990).

His first composition to attract wide attention was Prayer for Peace, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra (1981), garnering him the distinction of being the youngest composer since Samuel Barber to be premiered by that orchestra; the New York Philharmonic commissioned Philharmonia for its 150th anniversary (1990); the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Music commissioned Concerto for Brass Quintet for its 100th anniversary (1995); the Curtis Institute commissioned Much Ado for its 75th anniversary (2000). Hagen's commissions from major orchestras and performers between 1981 and 2008 included orchestral works, five symphonies (for the orchestras of Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Oakland, Albany, and Phoenix), seven concertos (for Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Jeffrey Khaner, and Sara Sant'Ambrogio, among others), several massive works for chorus and orchestra, two dozen choral works (including one for the Kings Singers), ballet scores, concert overtures, showpieces, two brass quintets, six piano trios, three string quartets, an oboe quintet, a duo for violin and cello, solo works for piano (His Suite for Piano was a featured new work for the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and works for Lara Downes and Bruce Brubaker), organ, violin (for Michaela Paetsch), viola, and cello, and seventeen published cycles of art songs. (Hagen has over 300 art songs in print.) A frequent collaborator with living writers, he has set poetry by Nuar Alsadir, Mark Campbell, Ze'ev Dunei, Stephen Dunn, Sarah Gorham, Susan Griffin, Peter Handke, Reine Hauser, Seamus Heaney, Robert Kelley, Richard McCann, Kim Roberts, Stephen Sandy, Mark Skinner, and Mark Strand, among others. In 1990 Hagen began a creative collaboration with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon that resulted in four major operas: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005). "[Writing libretti for Hagen's operas gave Muldoon], a writer who has had to weather accusations of cerebral detachment and heartlessness the opportunity to indulge in frank emotionalism," writes David Wheatley. Libretti for Hagen operas have also been written by Barbara Grecki (New York Stories, 2008), J.D. McClatchy (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 2010), and Gardner McFall (Amelia, 2010). He has written his own libretti (A Woman in Morocco, 2013,New York Stories, 2008,Orson Rehearsed, 2019, and 9/10: Love Before the Fall, 2023).

• Jens Staubrand: Kierkegaard International Bibliography Music Works and Plays, Copenhagen 2009. In English and Danish., Including Daron Hagen's LORD, GOD IN HEAVEN from LITTLE PRAYERS, 1994 • Paul Kreider 1999. Art songs of Daron Hagen: lyrical dramaticism and simplicity with an interpretive guide to rittenhouse songs and resuming green. DMA diss., University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. • Edwin Powell 2002. Bandanna, an opera by Daron Aric Hagen with libretto by Paul Muldoon commissioned by the College Band Directors National Association: the origins of an artwork with a glimpse at its musical character development. DMA diss., University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. • Jane McCalla Redding 2002. An introduction to American song composer Daron Aric Hagen (b. 1961) and his miniature folk opera: dear youth. DMA diss., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. • Sarah Elizabeth Snydacker 2011.The new American song: A catalog of published songs by 25 living American composers. Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. • Wallace, Jacob 2015. Bandanna Overture. In Teaching Music through Performance in Band. Volume 10, Compiled and edited by Richard Miles, 705–714. Chicago: GIA Publications. • Jay B. Aiken 2016. The Choral Music of Daron Aric Hagen and a Conductor's Analysis of Flight Music. DMA, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. • Nicole Kenley-Miller 2012–2018. Voicing Virginia: Adaptation of Woolf’s Words to Music. DMA diss., University of Houston, Houston, Texas. • Noh, Shin-Yeong 2019. Emily Dickinson's Poetic Imagery in 21st-century Songs by Lori Laitman, Jake Heggie, and Daron Hagen. DMA diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. • Kosin, Kelci Dalayne, 2019 A performance guide to selected arias from Daron Hagen's opera Amelia through the study of selected Hagen art songs. DA, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.,

• Official Biography at Daron Hagen Website • Allmusic Biography * • Guggenheim Foundation Fellow Profile

• 2019 WILDSound Film Festival Podcast interview about "Orson Rehearsed" • 2019 New England Public Radio Presto: Episode #8 with John Nowacki – Daron Hagen discusses, and reads from, his memoir • 2018 Classical Classroom, Episode 181: The Magicians – Daron Hagen on Orson Welles • 2016 Houston Public Media interview about Ned Rorem • 2015 Houston Public Media interview about Benjamin Britten and the opera "Billy Budd" • 2010 Composing Thoughts Interview with John Clare for Texas Public Radio discussing Amelia, Piano Trios, and Violin Concerto • 2009 Yale Oral History of American Music "Major Figures in American Music" interview

The following is established of the heading itself.

Hagen lays out his creative manifesto as an auteur "operafilm" creator in his monograph, "Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy," (2026) “Operafilm [is] a new audiovisual genre in which the auteur director-composer-writer-editor's consistent application of aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music drama, film, and their performance practices create and sustain a coherent aesthetic world in which every element manifests that world." He further explains in his memoir, “Duet with the Past” (2019) that he began working out the idea of “operafilm” and The Bardo Trilogy while directing the premiere of I Hear America Singing (2014) for the Skylight Music Theater and his “three-camera staging” of A Woman in Morocco (2015) for Kentucky Opera. Orson Rehearsed, (2021), part one of the Bardo Trilogy, explored Orson Welles’ dying thoughts; part two, 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2023), combined mythological and “real” characters in an Italian bistro the night before the Twin Towers disaster; part three, I Hear America Singing (2025), combined and subverted the conventions of musical theater and documentary film, to explore the last days of a Broadway composer. The trilogy is heavily laureled internationally, recorded on labels such as Naxos Records, and may be viewed worldwide on Amazon Prime Video and other streamers.

According to Opera News, "to say that [Hagen] is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music." The NATS Journal of Singing has described Hagen as "the finest American composer of vocal music in his generation." Hagen's debut opera Shining Brow premiered in 1993 to universally glowing reviews in the international press. When the Buffalo Philharmonic released the first recording on Naxos in 2009, David Patrick Sterns noted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "the ceaselessly inventive score hooks you early on, easily embracing a wide range of predominantly tonal modes of expression, from barbershop quartet to Der Rosenkavalier quotations. The music's theatrical timing and naturalistic sense of language – so problematic in other contemporary operas – feels effortlessly right. Dramatically speaking, the portrayal of the great architect is so unflinching that Wright (played with many layers of irony by the excellent Robert Orth) borders on being too unsympathetic to carry this sizable, two-act opera. Particularly effective is the musical creepiness that sets in as Wright's high-ego world grows refracted from reality.". Hagen's 2010 opera Amelia premiered to positive reviews in The New York Times, Financial Times, Times of London, Seattle Times, The Washington Post, and Opera Magazine, among others. Heidi Waleson in The Wall Street Journal described the work as "both highly original and gripping.... Amelia is a modern opera with traditional values... Mr. Hagen's restless, questioning music never loses its heart." Ivan Katz, in The Huffington Post, wrote "Hagen's score is well-composed and, in many respects, a work of genius. He tends to write in a more facile manner for the women, but his writing for the men (especially tenor William Burden) is complex and highly effective." Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times noted that "the opera is earnest and original, if heavy-handed and melodramatic. [It is] a serious, heartfelt and unusual work. However, there is too much lyricism and no break in the orchestral richness." His 2013 opera, A Woman in Morocco, deals with the issue of human trafficking. A "film noir, verismo, cinéma vérité". When the work was given its professional premiere in spring 2015 under Hagen's direction by Kentucky Opera, professional critics noted that "[its] complex score works to underline issues with leitmotifs, musical cues assigned to different characters, and music that never settles or rests. When singers get soaring arias, they emerge naturally from this intricate texture. Hagen has a gift for writing sensually rich tunes and uses this skill to release the music at important moments." Most of the universally positive reviews touched approvingly on the opera's subject matter: "Will [a new opera] find a connection with tradition while creating something fresh and timely? I believe that composer Daron Hagen and his co-librettist Barbara Grecki have [done this] with their new two-act opera.... Hagen's score feelingly captures the deep contradictions of its story and its characters in music that evokes the beauty and mystery of an exotic landscape, the dangerous and deceptive sensuality of its inhabitants, and the intense violence that is always just beneath the surface of a culture that threatens and terrorizes women.

The scholarly and documentary record stands as follows. Recorded as having received Guggenheim Fellowship.