daron aric hagen

'Before I forget, I want to tell you that Marc used to like to sit over there,' said David Diamond during the winter of 2006 at Yaddo, pointing at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We were sitting on one of the pews in the Music Room. His eyes brimmed with tears.

'Marc cared. When he wrote Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny's Trouble in Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?'

I knew David was capable of making things up, but I trusted him that evening. I had served as curator for a concert of music by composers who had worked at Yaddo, and had just introduced a lovely, spirited performance of his early Flute Quintet by Michael Boriskin and the Music From Copland House ensemble. I had suggested that he be invited and, to everyone's astonishment, he had agreed to come. He told me that he had wanted to visit Yaddo one more time before he died.

'You know,' he said, 'I can actually see them all around us: Lenny, Aaron, Virgil, Marc.' He meant it. Tears.

'I think that it is an illusion that the dead have left us, David' I ventured. He smiled, patted my hand.

'They're all here, Daron,' he said, with conviction, 'especially at Yaddo.'

At that moment, school children from the audience surrounded us; they had loved his piece. David smiled like a child, accepting their praise, asking them their names.

He died of heart failure a few days later.