“A composer born to write operas” (Chicago Tribune) possessed of an “infinitely fertile imagination” (Fanfare Magazine) whose music is “dazzling, unsettling, exuberant, and heroic” (The New Yorker), “Hagen’s music represents a considerable artistic achievement of uncompromising seriousness” (Times Literary Supplement). Opera News describes his Amelia as “one of the 20 best operas of the 21st century;” NATS Journal of Singing calls him “the finest American composer of vocal music in his generation.” “A 21st-Century artist whose spirit is unchained from a singular medium” (OperaWire), Hagen composes works of “theatrical audacity,” that showcase his “gift for big, sweeping tunes” (New York Times) in a creative voice that “is both highly original and gripping; restless, questioning music that never loses its heart.” (Wall Street Journal). “To say that he is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music,” wrote Ned Rorem in Opera News. His “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet With the Past (McFarland, April 2019) “takes him from his haunted childhood to the upper echelons of musical life in New York and Europe” (Tim Page). p/c: Burning Sled Media
Daron Hagen occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music and opera composer and as a visionary auteur composer-director on the vanguard of “operafilm,” a genre in which he weaves together aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music, drama, film, and their performance practices to manifest narrative. Along with screenings at festivals, his Bardo Trilogy operafilms are internationally laureled and viewable worldwide on major streamers including Amazon Prime Video. His book Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy will be published in fall 2025 by McFarland and Company.
Commissioned steadily by ensembles and institutions large and small over the past 45 years including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Seattle Opera, his works have entered the repertoire and are perennially programmed. His collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Sara Sant’Ambrogio, Paul Sperry, Marni Nixon, and Gore Vidal. His “ruthlessly honest, beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019.
A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowships, the Bogliasco Fellowship, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, and two American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, he has taught at Bard College, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, the Curtis Institute of Music, and others.
Recorded on Naxos and Sony, published by Peermusic Classical, represented by Encompass Arts, a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard, he is married to Gilda Lyons.
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