“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 for five decades by international ensembles and institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Seattle Opera, his works are perennially programmed. His collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Sara Sant’Ambrogio, Paul Sperry, Marni Nixon, and Gore Vidal. His memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019.
A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo and Guggenheim Fellow, he has received two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowships, the Bogliasco and Camargo Fellowships, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, NEA and Opera America grants, and two American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards. He has led music festivals and non-profit foundations and taught at Bard, Curtis, the Chicago College of Performing Arts and the Princeton Atelier.
Recorded on Naxos and Sony, published by Peermusic Classical, represented by Encompass Arts, a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard, he and Gilda Lyons have two children.
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