They are two of Buffalo's guiding lights. Frank Lloyd Wright left us a wealth of creations, including the Darwin Martin House, pointing to the past and the future. Louis Sullivan's legacy is our magnificent, imposing terra cotta Guaranty Building.

The two architects lived and worked at a time when the world was changing so fast that, looking back, it seems a blur. "Shining Brow," the opera by Daron Hagen about Wright's impressive array of midlife crises — which included a thorny professional relationship with Sullivan — captures this moment with close to perfect accuracy. Music can express what can't be said in words, or even in bricks and mortar.

Many people tend to avoid new music, fearing it is dissonant and jarring. Hagen's music is not. Except for a couple of shocking moments, it falls sweetly on the ears. The Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus, especially, contributes lovely, carollike interludes. BPO Music Director JoAnn Falletta moves the work along with a steady grace.

The references to the music of Wright's time are striking. An anguished cry mirrors a moment in Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer." The opera's second half includes a whimsical collage of the teens. A kind of barbershop quartet refers to historical events, from Geronimo to the Model T. A cafe pianist and violinist [Amy Glidden, the Philharmonic's associate concertmaster, fills the role charmingly] play a waltz. The charm is shockingly offset by the musical depiction of the murder of Wright's muse, Mamah, and her children at Taliesin. Hagen makes the orchestra instruments scream, and a haunting image appears on screen of flames and the shadow of a hand.

Baritone Robert Orth makes Wright a sympathetic figure. It's a glitch of casting that Robert Frankenberry, who plays his "Lieber Meister" [dear master] Sullivan, looks so much younger. Frankenberry threatens to steal the show. His clear tenor carries easily through the hall. The light-voiced Elaine Valby gives a touching portrayal of the abandoned Catherine Wright, and Brenda Harris gives Mamah an arresting intensity. Mamah's husband, Edwin, is sung by Matthew Curran, an excellent baritone. — Mary Kunz, Buffalo News, 11/5/06

"Shining Brow," Daron Hagen's opera about a tumultuous time in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, ends with a tragedy. The love of Wright's life has just been massacred, along with most of their household. The architect stands on stage, dazed and alone, wondering how he will go forward.

This weekend, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will be joined by a cast of singers for a semi-staged performance of that opera. Hagen will be in the audience, and as he loses himself again in the drama, he will almost certainly remember the emotions he felt after the first production, 15 years ago.

"What I will never forget is when Paul Muldoon, the librettist, and I were standing at the back rail, and the stage director, Stephen Wadsworth, he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, "You did that.' I said, "What?' He said, "Look around. They're all crying.' "

Hagen grows quiet, reliving the moment. "I said, "Good, that's what you want.' I realized here we were in the dark telling ghost stories.

"We were partaking in a ritual that goes back to the beginning of time," he says. "It's a communion. It's what the Catholic Church understands. That what makes Mass moving. It's the distillation of opera. What opera hopes to achieve is that communion."

Hagen, who has written four major operas, has been in town most of the week helping prepare the latest production of "Shining Brow."

Already, he's familiar with Buffalo from research he has done on Wright's architecture and also from Wright's ardent cult of fans, whom he hears from frequently.

JoAnn Falletta, who will be conducting the opera, stresses the beauty of its music.

"The opera is very romantic, neo-romantic," she says. "Daron Hagen went back to the kind of language that really speaks to people. It's very accessible, warm, beautiful music — lush, wonderfully written for voice."

Falletta is sure "Shining Brow" will speak to Buffalonians.

"It talks about Buffalo a lot," she says. "He never thought it would be coming to Buffalo, but it talks about his early life, houses he's building in Buffalo where one room flows into the next. He talks about the Darwin Martin house, which is eerie. He talks about his thorny relationship with Louis Sullivan," she adds, alluding to the great architect who built our Guaranty Building.

Hagen, 44, grew up in Wisconsin, not far from Taliesin, Wright's estate. He wrote the opera in the 1980s, coached by his composition teacher, Leonard Bernstein. (Hagen refers to him as "L.B.")

"Shining Brow" confronts Wright at what could be called the dramatic crossroads of his life. The opera's opening finds him beginning to break free from his mentor, Sullivan. His personal life is thrown into upheaval, too, when he meets Mamah, the woman for whom he would leave his wife.

When he wrote "Shining Brow," Hagen was fascinated by this turbulent point in Wright's life. The composer, who is married, was particularly drawn by Wright's struggles to balance his creativity with his family.

"Back then, I was giving a lot of time in my own life to thinking about what role a family plays in the life of a dedicated artist," he says. "To put that many people's lives in jeopardy because of your own personal and ethical decisions, that's great personal drama."

What words does Hagen have for all of us who will be seeing his opera for the first time?

Hagen pauses, pondering. "I would encourage you to take the journey with the characters," he says.

"It's my hope — and the librettist's, Paul Muldoon's — that at the end of the opera, people wind up thinking about the personal decisions all these people made. To me, that's the power of a great human drama like this, about the intersection between life and art. We don't answer any questions, but we do pose questions." —Mary Kunz, Buffalo News, 11/3/06

"The finale [of Shining Brow] is as devastating as anything in opera. At Wednesday's premiere, given by the Madison Opera, 2,200 at the Oscar Mayer Theater were so quiet that baritone Michael Sokol, who played Wright, could bring his closing aria down to a murmur.

The power of the finale comes from more than subject matter. It does not merely press emotional buttons. It moves us because theatrical and emotional logic accumulate over 21/2 hours of music, words and action.

A great strength of this piece (and a rarity in opera) is its complexity of character. People drift off in soliloquy, they contradict themselves, they quote other characters without realizing it.

That is, they think and act like real people, with all the social and personal chaos that suggests. The miracle of Shining Brow is that such a taut and gripping form rises from such chaos.

Form follows feeling. Musical motives and keys associated with characters and situations rise from the flow and take on meaning and resonance parallel to the text repetitions. And those motives and keys overlap to make dramatic conflict live in musical sound.

Hagen's baseline idiom seems to be modernist-expressionist, tonal but freely dissonant. He sets all sorts of influences, from barbershop to ticky-tick dance music against that idiom, to underscore character and crystallize the period (1903-'14). Wright and the chorus of draftsmen sing in a sort of Romantic Anglican church style, which the draftsmen satirize behind Wright's back. The same goes for the spacious, Copland-Americana song of the construction workers.

In the finale, when the Maid undercuts Wright's lament with a song like a mouth full of nails, we remember how amusingly he was undercut earlier. The contrast touches us all the more deeply.

This fine new opera, this Shining Brow, will be repeated at 8 p.m. Friday and 2:30 pm Sundayhttp://daronhagen.com/brow." — Tom Strini The Milwaukee Journal 4/22/93

"Madison Opera has come up a winner in the tricky business of commissioning operas: Daron Hagen and Paul Muldoon, composer and librettist of the exciting new Shining Brow, neither of whom has written an opera before, bring fresh ideas to their work — based on an incident in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. The great American architect and Taliesin (Welsh for Shining Brow), the home he built for himself in Wisconsin, share the center of the story. The remarkable quality of Muldoon's libretto is quickly evidenthttp://daronhagen.com/brow.

Like Dominick Argento, Hagen writes particularly well for the voice. The vocal burden falls on Wright — a plummy role for lyric baritone, marvelously sung and acted by Michael Sokol — and Mamah, a no less juicy spinto soprano role, beautifully realized by velvet-toned Carolann Page. Each of these characters has an affecting soliloquy, splendidly crafted to display a huge emotional and vocal range, and each singer made the most of the opportunityhttp://daronhagen.com/browhttp://daronhagen.com/brow

A full, enthusiastic house closed the production (April 25) with a standing ovation." — John Koopman, Opera News, November 1993

"Hagen's music makes no errors. And like the stronger stretches in the theater and concert music of, say, Dominick Argento and John Harbison, he sustains the idea of non-minimalist tonality as a still-viable medium.

Hagen can also use musical quotations from the past wittily without sounding opportunistic. The word "Utopia," for example, is punched at you suddenly on the notes of "Suburbia" from Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, a motif that Bernstein himself lifted from the opening phrase of "New York, New York" in his own On the Town. The homage is appropriate since Hagen got much advice from Bernstein and dedicated Shining Brow to his memory.

And it's only justice that Hagen zeroed in on that chronic self-borrower, Richard Strauss, to construct a party-scene trio of on-stage piano, violin, and cello and occupy them with a chain of variations (including ersatz-jazz segments) on a couple [sic] of tunes from Der Rosenkavalier. Furthermore, Hagen wasn't above musicalizing some loud-mouthed reporters as a barbershop quartet. (He hopes for good reviews?)

[Late in the opera, Wright and Sullivan] meet for a painful reconciliation; they stand motionless and leave it to the orchestra to pour out softly Hagen's most moving music. The show was an event." — Leighton Kerner, The Village Voice 5/5/93

"Commissioning new work is risky business, for even the largest and most established opera companies. But American opera is on a roll http://daronhagen.com/brow. Shining Brow proved to be an absorbing, beautiful staged work.

Sullivan's design maxim, "Form follows function," was evoked throughout the opera. But Hagen's spare, evocative score demonstrated the truth of another famous architect's rule, Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more," The orchestral writing was austere and carefully placed as the beams in Wright's homes.

Hagen and Muldoon managed to turn a debate about order in the universe into a riveting operatic scene." — Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times 4/23/93

"Muldoon's libretto, commissioned for use by Hagen as a libretto, is one of the few one may actually want to take home and study as literature. The vocal lines might remind some of Benjamin Britten, and at lighter moments, even of Stephen Sondheim. Though sometimes difficult, and with wide leaps, it does not tear at the voices, but favors them. Similarly, the orchestral score http://daronhagen.com/brow. closely supports, rather than fights, both the singers and the drama." — Joseph Cunniff, Hyde Park Herald 7/30/97

"Shining Brow is a powerful, perfect liaison of music and words." — Bill Gowen, Arlington Heights Daily Herald 8/1/97

"This [is a] stunning new American opera. The music is splendid with haunting tonal intensity, and as down to earth as a barbershop quartet." — Kathleen Tobin, The Beverly Review, Chicago 8/13/97

"Daron Aric Hagen's music was quite in tune with the drama of [Wright's life]." — Stanley Tigerman, Architecture Magazine 9/97

"Hagen's lyrically sensitive, multilayered score deals in shifting tonal centers and textures that mirror various 'realities' in the lives of the opera's characters." — Blair Kamin, Architecture Critic, The Chicago Tribune 7/25/79

"[Shining Brow] is a masterpiece of the '90'shttp://daronhagen.com/browhttp://daronhagen.com/brow Melodic yet dissonant, Hagen's gripping music, with some suggestions of hymn and folksong styles, grows out of the tradition of Copland."

"Its unnerving impact brings to mind [Gian Carlo] Menotti's The Medium. To ease the tension before the catastrophic events, a delightful barbershop quartet, in razor-sharp tune, gives a tour of world events from 1912 to early 1914." — Walter Skiba, The Illinois Times, Lansing, Indiana 7/30/97

"Operas that are essentially interior dramas have always been difficult to bring off in the theater — but not impossible, as Daron Hagen's and Paul Muldoon's Shining Brow, now playing in Chicago, makes clear." — John von Rhein, The Chicago Tribune 7/29/97

"Chicago Opera Theater's performances of Shining Brow http://daronhagen.com/brow. were a triumph." — Sarah Bryan Miller, Chicago Reader 8/8/97

"[Shining Brow] is a daring venture on the part of several bright young talents. The entire enterprise exuded intelligence. Mr. Hagen has a gift for the big tune, and he serves up some beauties in the choruses, evoking the blues and a Colonial hymn. Mr. Hagen is most interesting when he assaults the ear roundly or falls squarely back on tradition. The musical texture is well varied and consistently engaging.

Mr. Muldoon's libretto and Mr. Birn's design, excellent and involving in themselves, accord well with Mr. Hagen's style. One scene in particular, evoking a disastrous news conference held by Wright on Christmas 1911 to explain his relationship to Cheney despite his continuing marriage to Catherine, was utterly brilliant." — James R. Oestreich, The New York Times 4/28/93

"Hagen and Muldoon crafted their opera with much the same eye on the unity-within-variety that was basic to Wright's own aesthetic. From the evidence of Shining Brow, the Milwaukee-born Hagen is a composer born to write operas. Hagen uses various keys to identify the principal players — B-flat for Wright, E major for Mamah, and so forth — sometimes merging them in ingenious polytonal passages that mirror these characters' shifting emotional states. There are also deliberate references to older music, including a quotation from Der Rosenkavalier, which Wright and Cheney saw in its world premiere in Berlin in 1911. Hagen gives his singers gratifying flights of lyrical expansion, but his score is all of a piece, underscoring the drama and propelling it forward. Particularily impressive are the choral ensembles that support the two acts of the opera like firm musical pillars.

Shining Brow offers further evidence that the salvation of American opera will come not necessarily from the big East Coast companies but from enterprising regional theaters like Madison's. One hopes other companies will mount productions of their own." -John Von Rhein, American Record Guide, July/August 1993

"From the evidence of Shining Brow, Daron Hagen is a composer born to write operas. His shifting tonal centers neatly mirror the shifting emotional realities of his characters, while his integration of various "found" musics (barbershop quartet here, fake Copland there) into a seamless, always singable flow is expert.

The work is a natural for the Chicago Lyric Opera's "21st Century" program. It is an opera any major opera company could present with pride." — John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune 4/23/93

"It is Carleton [the murderous Taliesin chef] who, on the plot level, is responsible for the culminating catastrophe, the burning of Taliesin with Mamah and her children inside [sic], and who, below the plot, challenges the other characters with the certainty and uniqueness of his language. To emphasize the point, this language is spoken — or rather, declaimed — while the orchestra stays silent. Mr. Hagen's nobility is to leave Carleton's self-statement outside the purlieu of music —

Mr. Hagen is a wizard at ornamentation, at form without function, at rhapsodic revellings in rhapsodic Strauss, at A-minor monologues, at perky orchestration, at blues and hymn and barbershop." — Paul Griffiths, The New Yorker 5/17/93

"The publicity surrounding the [premiere of Shining Brow] has been credited with indirectly influencing the passage of a local bond referendum authorizing the building of a local convention center designed by Wright many years previously.

Shining Brow is a considerable artistic achievement of uncompromising seriousness — one which found favor with those Wright admirers with whom I spoke for its accurate picture of some unlikely events.

Hagen's compositional ability is a decided asset. He is, first of all, an exceptional orchestrator, and the variety of sounds from the pit — from full orchestra to combination of instruments -- attests to an extremely acute ear for sonority.

One hopes that Shining Brow will be heard again." - Patrick Smith, The Times Literary Supplement 5/15/93

"Shining Brow deserves the Pulitzer Prize for three reasons: It is a quintessentially American opera (you won't find such a ravishingly beautiful hymn to work and craft in any German, Italian, or French opera). Its libretto is unusually inventive and poetic, rich in repetitive motifs and allusions. The music is by turns soaringly lyrical and wrenchingly dramatic.

More to the point, it is that rarest of all finds: an enduring piece of contemporary repertoire, something you will eventually see on recordings and in other productions. It would not be a surprise to see, for example, PBS put a production on the TV series "American Masters" or "Great Performances." — Jacob Stockinger, The Capital Times 5/6/93

"In common with much American composition of the 1980's, the music projects a very mixed pallet of styles, from highly abstract forms verging on expressionism to tonal lyricism of the unapologetically transparent sort, with many other things besides these extremes. If one were forced to pick a single parallel stylistic model, it would be Benjamin Britten, based on the opera's complex orchestration, on its original and enormously difficult vocal lines for solo voices and on skilled choral writing.

Scored for a large orchestra, the work is prodigious. The sheer emotional intensity of the characters and their painful, complex circumstances make it seem longer than it is; there's little happiness in Shining Brow.

To my ear, the best music was Sullivan's. He is truly a tragic figure, lost in loneliness, surpassed in fame by Wright, and consigned by fate to drown himself in brandy.[The singer who portrayed Sullivan] Barry Busse's bows were greeted by sustained shouts of "'Bravo!' from all over the house, including one from me.

It is a great work." — Jess Anderson, Madison Wisconsin Isthmus 4/30/93

"Composer Daron Hagen's score is textural and versatile — sometimes pompous, others witty, still others foreboding — but always in step with the action. His choral and orchestral arrangements are multi-layered yet beautifully simple. The interludes in particular are lyrical — so much so that the orchestration could stand on its own." — Ina Pasch, Wisconsin State Journal 4/22/93

"Intelligent theater talents both, Hagen and Muldoon make us think even as they make us feel. The libretto resonates with a richly allusive poetry one needs supertitles to fully appreciate — and Chicago Opera Theater duly obliges. The text merges seamlessly with the long, singable lines and fluid tonal centers of Hagen's score, newly reduced for COT's 36-piece orchestra. He composes with enormous flair for voices and instruments in a postmodern tonal style distinctly his own. Hagen was born to write music theater works. It will be fascinating to see where he goes from here.

Shining Brow is one of the most important American operas of the past decade. Don't miss it."— John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune 7/27/97

"[Hagen] handles the chorus very well using different forms — barber shop, hymns, Broadway-style numbers — to convey a great deal of critical information and delineate individual voices with absolute clarity. http://daronhagen.com/brow.It's a difficult line to walk, skirting the ahistoricism of popular Broadway styles without throwing in contemporary distractions simply to show the flag." — Philip Kennicott, The St. Louis Post Dispatch 7/31/97

"Like Wright's flowing, open-plan prairie houses, [Hagen's] opera has immediate appeal."

"Just as Wright's seemingly simple houses expressed a far-reaching philosophy of architecture, so are Hagen and Muldoon interested in more than operatic pot-boiling. Shining Brow explores serious issues — the relationship of artist and muse, artist and mentor, the artist's place in society. Moving between the racy plot and extended moments of poetic philosophizing, the opera offers listeners a rigorous, ultimately rewarding, night at the opera.

"Hagen's score, with its unsettled solo melodies, dramatic orchestration and off-kilter passages, reflects Wright's life superbly. Hagen scaled down the forces for COT's 36-piece orchestra but lost none of the color that made the opera's premiere at the Madison (Wis.) Opera so compelling. When a broken, dispirited Sullivan, affectingly sung by tenor Barry Busse, wandered the stage in the second act, a solo cello melody accompanied him like a mournful shadow. A soft-shoe routine, spiked by dissonances and quirky rhythms, was exactly right for a quartet of cynical newsmen." — Wynne Delacoma, The Chicago Sun-Times 7/28/97

"There was always something larger than life about Frank Lloyd Wright, who defied convention in his architectural designs and generally treated associates, clients, wives and lovers as accessories to his self-aggrandizing vision of his own destiny. On July 25, the architect who exerted such a profound effect on American architecture in this century returned, in song, to his heartland home.

"Shining Brow, composer Daron Aric Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon's 1993 opera, which had its local premiere in a brilliant new production by Chicago Opera Theater, explores the ambiguities that separated Wright's flamboyant public image from his darker private side mdash;.

"The libretto, which resonates with richly allusive poetry, merges seamlessly with the long, singable lines and fluid tonal centers of Hagen's score, newly reduced for COT music director Lawrence Rapchak's thirty-six piece orchestra. COT's production, directed by Ken Cazan and supervised by the composer, was more intimate, better at defining relationships than the world premiere at Madison Opera four years ago had been. The choral scenes that function as pillars supporting the action were especially well achieved.

"Robert Orth made a superb Wright, firmly sung and believably acted. The Yuletide press reception at which the architect defends his adulterous behavior showed what a commanding singing actor the baritone can be. Matching his strengths, soprano Brenda Harris deftly revealed the pain beneath Mamah's free-spirited facade. Tenor Barry Busse ... offered a believably weary, disillusioned Louis Sullivan, Wright's brandy-quaffing mentor. Bass Bradley Garvin and mezzo Kitt Reuter Foss were admirable as the discarded spouses, Edwin Cheney and Catherine Wright." — John Von Rhein, Opera News, 10/97