“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: Karen Pearson

“Daron,” declared Opera News when the first of Hagen’s fourteen operas Shining Brow, premiered to international popular and critical acclaim in 1992, “is music.” His debut in 1983 as the youngest composer ever premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra launched the career of what OperaWire describes as “a 21st-Century artist whose spirit is unchained from a singular medium.” For over four decades, he has been active as a composer, filmmaker, director, producer, collaborative pianist, librettist, screenwriter, essayist, mentor, new music concert impresario, music festival artistic director, and foundation president — all recounted in vivid detail in his 2019 “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past.

In 2010, Hagen began producing auteur, feature-length “operafilms” that have placed him on the vanguard of a new genre described as “a neo-Gesamtkunstwerk form of operatic cinema where each and everything seen on the screen, from the cuts to the lighting to the pacing, reflect the internal motivations of the story.” In other words, he serves simultaneously as co-producer, composer, conductor, librettist, screenwriter, director, and film editor, tightly intertwining every aspect of the music, story, action, and filmic imagery into a unified vision. Hagen is currently engaged in post-production of I Hear America Singing, the third installment of the Bardo Trilogy, an internationally laureled decade-long sequence of multi-media theatrical / filmic hybrid works that includes Orson Rehearsed and 9/10: Love Before the Fall.

Hagen’s Everyone, Everywhere — a large-scale cantata premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2023 by the Cecelia Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Michael Shapiro — was commissioned to honor the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He has been tapped for major orchestral works by the New York Philharmonic for its 150th, Yaddo for its 100th, the Buffalo Philharmonic for its 90th, and ASCAP and the Curtis Institute of Music for their 75th anniversaries. (His catalogue includes 14 operas, 2 opera films, 6 symphonies, 14 concertos, over 50 chamber and choral works, and over 300 widely sung art songs.) Along with numerous prestigious chamber ensembles, from the Kings Singers to the Horszowski Trio, he has been commissioned by the Seattle Opera, Albany Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and written concertos and roles for Gary Graffman, Nathan Gunn, Jeffrey Khaner, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Sharon Robinson, Sara Sant’Ambrogio, and the Amelia Piano Trio, among others. Among the conductors who have championed his works are Leonard Bernstein, Catherine Comet, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Erin Freeman, Andrew Litton, David Alan Miller, Michael Morgan, Kenneth Schermerhorn, and Leonard Slatkin.

A dedicated educator, Hagen has served on the faculties of Bard College, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, the City College of New York, the Curtis Institute of Music, New York University, and twice (with Paul Muldoon) as a master artist for the Princeton Atelier. He has also served as artist-in-residence at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Baylor University, as Miami University’s Sigma-Chi Huffman Composer in Residence, and as the Franz Lehar Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh.

He served as Composer-in-residence for the Denver Chamber Orchestra, and for the Long Beach Symphony and is Co-Chair of Composition at the Wintergreen Music Festival. Founding Artistic Director of the New Mercury Collective, he is also a member of the Distinguished Mentors Council of Composers Now, the Board of Advisors for Lyric Fest, and a Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo.

A champion of his contemporaries’ music since his student days, as Founding Director of the Perpetuum Mobile Concerts in New York and Philadelphia, Hagen programmed and presented new works by over a hundred colleagues; as artistic director and chair of faculty of the Seasons Music Festival in Yakima, Washington, he supervised the premieres of new works for orchestra and chamber ensembles by over a hundred more. He has served as grants adjudicator, score competition and commissioning panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, Copland House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Meet the Composer, private Foundations (including a term as the first president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation), festivals, and chaired panels and adjudication bodies as a Trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, and as a member of the boards of Joy in Singing and Composers Recordings Incorporated.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Hagen is the recipient of the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residencies, the Bogliasco Fellowship, the Barlow Endowment Chamber Music Prize and commission, the Columbia University Bearns Prize, ASCAP-Nissim Prize, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hagen’s discography as composer, conductor, and collaborative pianist includes over fifty albums on the Albany, Bridge, CRI, MSR, Naxos, New World, Sony, and other labels.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Hagen attended the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied composition with Homer Lambrecht and Les Thimmig and conducting with Catherine Comet; he received his Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and his Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Joseph Schwantner, and Bernard Rands. He worked with Leon Kirchner at Tanglewood, and with Lukas Foss and Leonard Bernstein privately.

His music is published by Peermusic Classical, and he is represented by Encompass Arts. He is married to composer-singer, and visual artist Gilda Lyons and has two sons, Atticus and Seamus.

— July 2024

Medium Biography