Daron Hagen occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music composer and as the author-director of internationally-laurelled feature-length “operafilms” combining 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.”
He has created 14 operas, 3 operafilms, 6 symphonies, 14 concertos, over 50 chamber, choral, and electroacoustic works, and over 300 songs. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Seattle Opera, and a dozen other orchestras, he’s created concertos / roles for Gary Graffman, Jeffrey Khaner, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Sara Sant’Ambrogio, Paul Sperry, and Marni Nixon. His “ruthlessly honest, 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, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, City College of New York, Curtis Institute of Music, and NYU.
Recorded on Naxos and Sony, published by Peermusic Classical, his music and operafilms stream on Amazon Prime Video. Represented by Encompass Arts, a graduate of Curtis and of the Juilliard School, he is married to Gilda Lyons.
“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