Currently available in print and E-book, McFarland and Company will release the Audio Book of Daron Hagen’s memoir, Duet With the Past, read by the author, on 16 June 2025. The audio book will be available on Amazon Music, Apple, Audible, Deezer, iHeart, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, and YouTube.
Learn more about the book at the McFarland website here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Composer, conductor and sometime-librettist Daron Hagen has written five symphonies, a dozen concertos, 13 operas, reams of chamber music and more than 350 art songs. Tracing his transformation from musical prodigy in a troubled family to successful artist in the tradition of Hector Berlioz and Ned Rorem, this memoir chronicles the world of the last generation of composers mentored by America’s great 20th century masters.
Hagen’s intimate narrative describes the teenage trauma of euthanizing his terminally ill mother at her request, and his struggles with depression and alcoholism before finding fulfillment as a father and husband. He offers vivid sketches of his many colleagues, friends and mentors, including Leonard Bernstein, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Otto Luening, Gian Carlo Menotti, Paul Muldoon, Vincent Persichetti, Ned Rorem, Paul Sperry, Virgil Thomson, Michael Torke, Gore Vidal and Stephen Wadsworth.
Daron gives a reading at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY in December 2019. p/c: Karen Pearson
Reviews
“[Hagen] takes a balanced inventory of his days and in the process he delivers a cogent depiction of an era of music.”
—Times Union
“Fascinating… Feels like an earlier part of American musical history… The book is a brave, revealing, and touching enterprise.”
—James Primosch, composer
“Duet with the Past is an unsparing and bleakly beautiful memoir from composer, conductor and operatic polymath Daron Hagen that takes him from his haunted childhood in Wisconsin to the upper echelons of musical life in New York and Europe. It is rich intellectual history, filled with privileged anecdotes about legends and near-legends, but especially valuable for the narrative candor of the author, who has seen much and taken care to remember it all for us, no matter how it may ache.”
—Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, editor, biographer, memoirist, University of Southern California
“It is a rare privilege to experience a glimpse into the inner world of a great artist, and Daron Hagen has opened the door to his life in a memoir of searing honesty and unguarded intimacy. Daron leads us through a journey that begins in a brilliant, talented but dysfunctional family, into the treacherous depths of the ruthless competition and political machinations of the classical music scene, to a search for a happiness that often seems unattainable. Filled with anecdotes of countless musical luminaries, Duet with the Past is irresistible in its revealing candor and charm- an unforgettable journey into the private world of one of our country’s greatest composers.”
—JoAnn Falletta, conductor Buffalo Philharmonic
“In an age suffused with memoir, it is rare indeed to read a book that is both ruthlessly honest and beautifully written. Duet with the Past is not only the chronicle of a brilliant young man who survived a family that, for decades, was haunted by death; it is also a cautionary tale that shows, with painful accuracy, the sacrifices needed to maintain a classical-music career in a brutally unforgiving business. Every young American composer should read it.”
—Russell Platt, composer and ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning music critic, Vanderbilt University.
Daron gives a reading at the Wintergreen Music Festival, Wintergreen, VA, in August 2020. p/c: H. Paul Moon
Daron gives a reading at Reinhardt University, Waleska, GA in February 2020. p/c: Cory Schantz
Autobiography, memoir, confessional: Daron Aric Hagen’s book is all of these things. It offers a candid telling of his personal story, at times heart-breaking, at times positively inspirational. It tells of a composer’s quest for truth, of a composer’s struggles in a highly competitive world; it offers illumination into a whole clutch of composers, but most revealingly the close ties Hagen has enjoyed with Ned Rorem, Lukas Foss, Leonard Bernstein, and David Diamond. For each, Hagen offers us, though the prism of his experience, windows into their lives. We also meet, though, the likes of Giancarlo Menotti, Ralph Shapey, Copland, Virgil Thomson, Joseph Schwantner, Michael Torke, Gunther Schuller, amongst many others. But most of all, we get to know Hagen, intimately.
Hagen’s journey is an intense, raw one. Like so many creatives, Hagen has his demons, primarily an uneasy relationship with alcohol (he at one stage refers to his “lost year of vagabondage”); manic episodes in Venice, Seattle, and Chicago act as markers. A difficult childhood and a fractured relationship with his father are vividly described, as is the tenderness of his mother. We feel her aspirations as a writer just as much as we feel the bond between mother and son; Hagen’s involving, painterly prose assures us of this. The tragedy of his brother Kevin’s pain trying to detox in order to attend a wedding is visceral (a scenario that leads Hagen to quit alcohol himself). But it is Hagen we get to know intimately, from his superstitions (and how he nearly forgets to perform his ritual of tapping the orchestra rail seven times before the premiere of the opera Little Nemo in Slumberland at Sarasota Opera) to his innermost fears, and loves.
Daron reads at Stephen F. Austin State University, Nagadoches, TX, February 2020. p/c: Stephen Lias
Hagen’s descriptions of others are vivid and come with an inbuilt ring of truth. They can be poetic, too. Of Diamond, he writes that, “he was a superb artisan whose Neo-classic compositions grafted intense lyricism with a neurotic and deeply felt hyper-contrapuntal style … like Witold Lutosławski, David wore excellently tailored suits … ” and so it goes on. His description of clearing out his deceased father’s belongings as “the melancholy triage of Executorship” seems to exude a particular poignance.
Places are important, and we sometimes meet them multiply, in different times and therefore from different perspectives. Hagen was brought up in Milwaukee. Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York is a vital part of Hagen’s story; so is Nicaragua, a place that also stages one half of the book’s Postlude (how beautiful Hagen’s description of “the sun, a somniferous blob of mercurochrome”). The other half of that Postlude is in Rheinbeck, New York where Hagen ends by (pardon the pun) passing the baton to his children. He is open and honest about his close relationships with people; we build an image of a person who cares desperately; and part of his journey has been about how to truly show that love.
Hagen’s music has been fiercely championed by JoAnn Falletta (he has also set some of her poetry); musical relationships are vital to Hagen, both colleagues and his many students. Those of music publishers, opera houses, and even us critics are described, often cherished, despite the politics. There are practical tips that may be gleaned here, perhaps most obviously the story of using the piccolo as a doubling to pad out small pit scorings in a revival of the opera Amelia in Chicago. “Through it all,” says Hagen, “I’ve just wanted to learn how to write a good opera.” And his best advice? “Relax: concentrate on people and process.”
Daron gives a reading at Roosevelt University, Chicago IL in December 2019. p/c: Kyong Mee Choi
There is lightness, approachability and depth to Hagen’s music. Try, perhaps, his music for the 1920 public domain film The Passion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydeto understand his dramatic sensitivity in instrumental terms. In penning this account of his life, loves, and complex web of connections, he invites us to share in new layers of understanding, not only of his music but of what it is to be a composer, a creator: the risks, the joys, the disappointments.
This is not a short book, and along the way each will find his or her own points of interest, too. For me, it was the references to CRI recordings, a label that existed from 1946 to 2007 and that has long fascinated me (the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, in the record label’s “obituary” on 4/13/2003, called it a “scrappy nonprofit label”). Which brings in the appendices: Hagen gives a “Select Discography” (a complete one might have offered a more useful service) and a “List of Works and Premieres,” which excludes most withdrawn works but gives artist details and dates of premieres.
Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give is that the book is riveting from first to last; and I write his as no regular reader of autobiographies. In short, it is a fabulous, revealing, and sometimes revelatory read, a window into a sometimes tortured soul with what feels like a happy ending (Hagen was born in 1961, so one hopes for much more happiness to come). Well chosen photos pepper the text at strategic points.
—Colin Clarke, Fanfare Magazine, June 2020
“A concise, cliché-laden synopsis of Daron Hagen’s Duet with the Past might read, “A memoir of love and loss and a life redeemed by music.” But while clichés often ring true, they can conceal as well as reveal. Missing would be Hagen’s deftly drawn portraits of his teachers, mentors, and future colleagues—Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Lukas Foss, David Diamond, and David Del Tredici for starters—including many members of the operatic, orchestral, commercial, and academic communities who shared important milestones in his multiple careers as composer, music copyist, arranger, proofreader, teacher, lyricist, stage director, and “man of the theater” who has “perform[ed] every one of its constituent jobs.” His cinematic, palpably sensory recollections of life in Wisconsin, Paris, Venice, Nicaragua, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Philadelphia, and of fruitful years spent at artist-retreats like Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, are colorfully interspersed with the well-paced chronicle of his evolution from music-entranced child to eager-to-please youth to mellowed, tolerant, prolific—“five symphonies, a dozen concertos, 13 operas, reams of chamber music and more than 350 art songs”—and compassionate composer. Those seeking access to the behind-the-scenes workings of a composer’s world, from “the Green Room to the Boardroom,” will be amply rewarded.
At times tragic or melancholic, the memoir unsparingly confronts the downward spiral of a family blighted by alcoholism and early, preventable death and the unhappy denouement of an impulsively entered-into marriage. But it also celebrates his worshipful love for his talented mother, second wife Gilda (a composer and singer), and sons Atticus and Seamus, that helped him overcome his self-destructive, depressive tendencies as he gradually transformed himself into a “humane and mostly happy man.” Late in the book, Hagen reflects that “a biographer pursues his subject’s truth by marching facts down the page after it like little soldiers, while an artist interlaces life’s storylines and dreams, pleating and plaiting memory and associations until one’s truth emerges as a braid.” Arresting though the story is as it “marches” more or less chronologically through the years, it’s the artistically woven warp and weft of his life’s tapestry that lingers.”
―Robert Schulslaper, Fanfare magazine, June 2020
If Daron Hagen weren’t a composer, he would be one hell of a writer. He IS one hell of a writer. I already knew that, from the too few times I’ve visited his blog. But I finally got around to reading his memoir, “Duet with the Past,” last month, and I have to say, it is one of the best-written books, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve read in a while.
I would think it would be an absorbing read for anyone who would chance to open the front cover, but it is especially compelling for somebody with a deep interest in mid-century American art music. Not that Hagen is of that generation – he’s only a few years older than I am – but his experiences as a student, composer, and copyist brought him into contact with an astonishing array of legends and luminaries of the era, including Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Eugene Ormandy (and Philadelphia’s associate conductor William Smith), Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Jack Beeson, and Aaron Copland – as well as Joan Tower, David Del Tredici, Michael Torke, and Aaron Jay Kernis, among others.
The writers he’s known and collaborated with include Paul Muldoon and Gore Vidal. My friend and colleague, Kile Smith, gets a few mentions (Hagen once worked with him at the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia), as does pianist Hugh Sung (who I finally just met for the first time a few weeks ago). The ghost of Marc Blitzstein, with whom Hagen in his youth is said to have borne some resemblance, also frequently rears his head.
All fascinating, of course, but Hagen’s story is even more riveting to me personally, as it seems he and I have lived parallel lives in a flabbergasting number of ways. Although I was never conscious of our paths having actually crossed, they must have. There are just too many shared interests and common hang-outs. You might say ours is a story of near-misses and there-but-for-the-grace-of-Gods.
Hagen arrived in Philadelphia only a few years before I did, to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. My college girlfriend worked at Curtis. He and I both like reading and books and are viscerally affected by the power of the written word. I worked in at least six bookstores in Philadelphia, one of them managed by Rorem’s niece. (Rorem was one of Hagen’s principal teachers.) One of the book shops I owned was within a block of Curtis. We’ve both amassed sizable libraries.
We both lived in the same neighborhood (as did, later, Jennifer Higdon), although perhaps at different times. But if you live in Center City Philadelphia, an expanse of less than 30 blocks and perhaps ten blocks up and down, you pretty much see everyone.
We were both regulars at the late, lamented neighborhood greasy spoon, Little Pete’s, on South 17th Street above Locust (right around the corner from Curtis), and Hagen totally nails the vibe, recollecting the smell of burnt coffee, the lime-green wrap-around counters, and the drunks nodding over their eggs in the wee hours of the morning. One of those drunks could very well have been me, on the way home from McGlinchey’s, prior to standing on a street corner with a friend and conversing volubly until the skies began to lighten. I read a substantial portion of “Les Miserables” there, and D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle,” the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and a charming book of essays, “Dreamthorp,” by Alexander Smith.
We also both clearly love classic movies. Hagen grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, within driving distance of a faded movie palace turned into a repertory house, and he writes lovingly of his experiences there. If I were to do the same, it would involve two or three such theaters I haunted during my teens and 20s.
Our upbringing was also eerily similar, with artistically-inclined, nurturing mothers and fathers ill-equipped to manage their impulses. I have to say, I was much luckier than Hagen was with how my situation turned out, as my mother got my sister and me away before any lasting physical or psychological damage could occur. Nevertheless, Hagen and I are both prone to nostalgia (though it’s possible I may be the more sentimental of the two of us) and melancholy. We’ve both gone on some legendary benders and stared into the abyss.
So, yes, perhaps the reason the book connected so well with me is because I identified so personally with many of his experiences.
Unlike me, Hagen managed to harness all those disparate elements and will himself into an artist of merit. Talent is great, but you also need drive, and Hagen’s work ethic, in all weather, is to be admired. He’s managed to build up quite the catalogue, especially, but by no means exclusively, as a successful opera composer. I’ve had several of his pieces in my library for years, and played a few on the radio. I could swear, at some point, I may even have introduced a concert broadcast of his opera “Amelia.”
Since finishing the book, I’ve ordered his four commercially-available operas (“Shining Brow,” “Vera,” “Bandanna,” and “Orson Rehearsed”). I am sorry so many of his major works have yet to be recorded. I would love to hear those he describes as Korngoldian – even his overture to “Much Ado About Nothing,” written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which earned him much scorn for being so frothy and allegedly lacking in substance. I assure you, Hagen has composed plenty of substance. Are composers not allowed to enjoy themselves once in a while? Tragically, the handwritten manuscript for a “Much Ado” opera he had been at work on was left in his room at the Hotel Warwick (across the street from Little Pete’s) as he fled Philly in humiliation, and the opera is now lost.
But no matter what adversity life tossed his way, Hagen just kept churning out music. I honestly don’t know how he’s done it, subletting his living spaces (and with them, apparently, his adorable, impressively long-lived cat, Clara, always there to nuzzle him on his battered return, who made it to 24 and enjoyed the first year of Hagen’s happy, stabilizing marriage) to take off to Europe or for residencies at artists’ colonies, burning through all his money, but somehow always landing on his feet with a plum commission and finally finding domestic happiness in Rhinebeck, New York, near Bard College (where I travel every summer for the Bard Music Festival), in a quaint Victorian home with his loving family. (I have eaten at the Tivoli restaurant he mentions in the book, where he and Joan Tower dine.)
He's not afraid to share his missteps, but if nothing else his life story demonstrates that even when you bottom-out, if you just hang in there, things might work out all right in the end. Talent and hard work are important, but luck, or chance, if you will, will always be a deciding factor. Life after all is a game of Chutes and Ladders. Hagen’s similes are less trite than mine, but he would be the first to admit he’s waded through quicksand on occasion, sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes not, only to have been lifted on the wings of angels. (His wife is composer, vocalist, and visual artist Gilda Lyons.)
By coincidence, Hagen’s latest album, “The Art of Song” (recorded at Curtis with Lyons one of the singers), was just released by Naxos within the last couple of weeks. Words and poetry have always been central to Hagen’s inspiration (which likely explains, in part, why he himself is such a good writer), and opera, song, and large-scale cycles comprise a significant portion of his output. As stated in the promotional material, “Divided into four ‘life seasons,’ this richly emotional cycle embraces themes that range from the human cost of America’s politics since the Civil War; the rueful wisdom of aging, love and nostalgia; and on towards tragedy, faith and an acceptance of nature’s cycles.”
Hagen can be nostalgic and hardnosed, pensive and reckless, ugly and beautiful, vainglorious and modest. But who among us has not been?
He writes with all five senses. Proust had his madeleine; Hagen had… well, everything apparently. We’ve all had the experience of certain scents conjuring memories, but Hagen, it seems, never forgot a smell, whether it be that of a dusty curtain in an old movie house or that distinctive blend of aromas that characterize any city. You can tell he’s always been a faithful journaler, which is only one more thing to admire. (Regrettably, my own very sporadic attempts have never made it past a few entries.)
He also has a good mind for similes and metaphors and all those tools of master storytellers and literary artists that make their work that much more engaging and enriching.
Not that the subject matter is always delightful. Hagen can be brutally honest, and it’s not always pretty. But in his writing, as in his music, he is dedicated to serving truth. He does so with enviable recall, a powerful command of observation, often great sensitivity, and a poetic disposition.
In the interviews I’ve seen, he’s as thoughtful and well-spoken in life as he is on paper.
There are plenty of samples of his music posted online and a lot of recorded interviews. You’d be doing yourself a favor by getting to know Daron Hagen.
—Classic Ross Amico, Syndicated Radio Host and Producer, WMUH, WXLV, and WWFM
"Duet with the Past" is a fascinating, thoroughly engrossing and often very powerful read. Beautifully written, well-crafted, thoughtful and deeply insightful observations on the ups and downs of "the creative life." Yes, there is pain and disappointment, as well as triumph and artistic ecstasy, explored here, but it is mixed with great humor and always intense honesty. Highly recommended for anyone who wishes to know more about the inner life and creative process of this outstanding composer, as well as gain some illuminating insights into other modern composers with whom the author has interacted throughout his career. Not just for musicians, this book will be an inspiration to artists in any medium.
—Douglas Hedwig, composer, Amazon.com