Daron Hagen occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music composer and as the auteur director of internationally-laurelled feature-length “operafilms” that combine his own music and screenplays, placing him on the vanguard of a new genre described by OperaWire as “a neo-Gesamtkunstwerk form of opera 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.” 

Since 1983 he has created 14 operas, 3 operafilms, 6 symphonies, 14 concertos, over 50 chamber, choral, and electroacoustic works, and over 300 artsongs. Commissions have come from the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Seattle Opera, and a dozen other orchestras; concertos / roles for Gary Graffman, Jeffrey Khaner, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Sharon Robinson, Paul Sperry, and Marni Nixon. His “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019.

A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, he is a 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, among others. He has taught at Bard College, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, City College of New York, the Curtis Institute of Music, New York University, and the Princeton Atelier.

His music is widely recorded on labels from Naxos to Sony; and published by Peermusic Classical. He is represented by Encompass Arts. A graduate of Curtis and of the Juilliard School, he is married to composer-singer Gilda Lyons; they have two sons, Atticus and Seamus.

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