daron aric hagen

From where I stood in my tuxedo at the rail of the orchestra pit, looking up into the slowly filling theater, it looked as though nearly all 2800 seats would have people in them. The interior of the elegant opera house was a wine dark sea of plush red velvet seats. Alone, I had walked nearly every foot of it during technical rehearsals, getting an idea of what the audience would see from every angle, "infiltrating" the theater just as I had the cavernous old Oriental Landmark movie palace in Milwaukee as a teenager.  The dream I had formulated there thirty-two years earlier, lying on the Oriental's stage on my back with a heap of musty safety curtain beneath my head, fingers interlaced at the nape of my neck, watching movies from behind the screen, had become reality.

The culmination not just of the past six years but also of my life so far as a composer, my grand opera Amelia, was about to be premièred in a 3.6 million dollar production by Seattle Opera, one of...