daron aric hagen

Harry Shoplas handed me a shiny euphonium when I was nine I think because I was husky and looked like I could manage carrying the thing back and forth to school. He quickly switched me to alto saxophone—my brother Britt played the baritone saxophone in Harry's super-cool dance band and I aspired to playing with him. I loved the smell of wet reeds, and the taste of cane, but I could never get the thing to play softly. Our fifth grade band concert closed with a song called Spanish Eyes which I recall because it was the last time I touched a saxophone.

My sixth grade teacher Norman Cummings allowed me one Halloween to organize, direct, and star in a live recreation over the Linfield Grade School public address system Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds. Rehearsing and performing it with my chums was my first exposure to live theater. I was euphoric; like a cat with his nip. A year later the talented, driven, somewhat emotionally unstable Wallace Tomchek at Pilgrim Park Junior High School painstakingly taught me Norman Dello Joio's lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind. I was a boy soprano with a quavering vibrato; my dead-straight bangs were the work of Mother and a pair of pruning shears. He introduced me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined. If the passion for drama came first, music followed quickly and came with greater ease. Combining the two—becoming an opera composer—seems now to have been inevitable.

The choral repertoire Tomchek taught us was sophisticated and eclectic—challenging Gesualdo madrigals, slick 'swing choir' arrangements in close nine part harmony, and a yearly fully-staged musical with orchestra which he designed, directed, rehearsed, and conducted. Since then I've attended professional productions of my operas that weren't as excellently produced. He cast me in supporting roles (I hadn't the looks or vocal power to carry a leading role), and gave me opportunities to direct. I recall with particular fondness directing Dan Quakkelaar and some other friends in Thornton Wilder's The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

Kay Hartzell conducted the choir at Brookfield Central High School. By then I was more interested in music than words. She allowed me to whip up some parts for small combos for the spring musicals. Kay was a gifted and caring choral director. When, twenty three years after graduating high school, I returned to hear Kay's successor Philip Olsen conduct We're All Here, a work commissioned by Phil and Milwaukee's fine professional contemporary music ensemble Present Music for chorus and mixed ensemble, I was astonished and moved to recognize in the chorus the faces of the children of the boys and girls with whom I attended High School.

I think I learned the most, though, from observing my brother Kevin first organize a professional theater troupe called Act One Productions, then direct and star in (Kevin as Pope Hadrian VII, left; with Britt, right, as His Grace Cardinal Archbishop of Pimlico) a production of the profoundly eccentric Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian VII to an audience of about fifty people huddled together in the middle of a 2600-seat theater. I was in awe of my brothers and the glorious popular failure that was their excellent production. Kevin's next production (highly successful) was Weill and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, in which I was delighted to be cast in a non-speaking walk-on role as one of Macheath's henchmen. Kevin was a fine director, already displaying as a teenager the talents that would later serve him so well in his thirty-year-plus career in orchestra management. I owe my introduction to Blitzstein, Britten, and to opera in general entirely to Kevin.

Although I did write the music and libretto for a thirty-minute operatic monodrama called Through the Glass (I staged it and conducted) which figured in Ned's accepting me as a student, and I had written a musical called Together in my teens, Shining Brow was my first professional opera, written when I was in my twenties for the Madison Opera. The libretto was by poet Paul Muldoon, with whom I went on to write three more operas. A big, traditional sprawling opera with a large cast, chorus and orchestra, Brow ran over 130 minutes and established my reputation as a theater composer.

I have only written operas whose characters are coming to grips with the same issues I am as a man at the time of the creation of the opera. I can't imagine working from any other place.

Vera of Las Vegas, which I identified as a 'nightmare cabaret opera in one act' was anything but cabaret—it was a searing, subversive examination of the American Dream's seamy underside. Commissioned by the University of Nevada Las Vegas for its faculty and students and running sixty minutes, with a libretto by Muldoon, it was at first intended to serve as the middle act of a trittico which would have begun with Paul's playlet Six Honest Serving Men and concluded with Grand Concourse, which dealt with the destruction of the Twin Towers. (Maybe someday we'll write them; I hope so.) Scored in two versions, big band with string quartet and jazz quartet, it is my most-revived opera. The Irish revival (a European premiere, by Dublin's Opera Theatre Company) and subsequent tour were some of the best serious fun I've had in the theater.

Having chosen issues common to myself and my characters, I then can (and must) respect them enough to let them choose the sort of music they are going to sing, not me. If my operas have been deemed eclectic it is only because the characters in them have been. First I merge (as an actor does in his role) with the character I am writing. Once I cannot separate the character from myself in my own mind, I am ready to hear the kind of music I must sing. The character's age, access to education, cultural reference points, etc. all function as parameters in my conscious mind; how the character feels emerges from the subconscious: I think, feel, and improvise the orchestral part, sing and play. The rest is instinct and dictation. Exactly to the extent to which the subconscious leads, the character comes across to me as psychologically and emotionally verifiable.

The third project with Muldoon was Bandanna, a two act re-telling of the Venetian story of the Moor set on the Texas-Mexican border during the summer of 1968. Commissioned by over a hundred university bands, it was scored for band, utilized a big cast and chorus, and has proven to be the most problematic of my operas when revivals are contemplated, since the fact that there are no strings in the pit can be a deal-breaker with opera companies large enough to mount it.

I have written, in this order, four major female roles: Mamah Cheney (an upper middle class Caucasian proto-feminist who left her husband to take up with Frank Lloyd Wright and was destroyed by it), Vera (an African American transvestite Lap Dancer from the red earth country of rural Virginia in the throes of personal reinvention—it was Vera's quest for personal reinvention, not his gender issues, with which I identified), Mona Morales (a lower class Caucasian woman married to a Latin man who, in a fit of jealousy, murders her), and Amelia (an upper middle class Caucasian who has lost both parents, is on the verge of childbirth, and moves from loss to recuperation).

The fourth opera with Paul was called The Antient Concert. I subtitled it 'a Dramatic Recital for Four Singers' and string quartet (or piano). The opera concerned itself with the 1904 Feis Ceoil competition recital on 27 August 1904 in the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, Ireland. Legend has it that John McCormack and James Joyce competed that night in the Tenor singing competition. There is no documentary evidence of this; however, Joyce did win the Bronze Medal that year (it is said that he did not agree with the stipulation that competitors demonstrate their musicianship by doing some sight-reading, and left the stage). Many believe that it was McCormack's 1903 win of the Gold Medal that launched his career.

I have identified more intensely with the four major female roles in my operas—especially while writing them—than any other characters I've created. I believe I can track the progression of my own mourning for my mother through my characterizations of these women.

For the purpose of telling a story about the collision of words, music, performance, sex, death, and nationalism, Paul and I chose five traditional ballads that Joyce and McCormack might have performed that evening, and used them as the musical and textual foundation upon which the piece was built. Consequently, throughout the recital, the characters shifted between 'performance mode' and the expression of their inner thoughts. Premiered at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, my favorite production of this work so far has been a site-specific staging that I did at the Century Association in New York. I would like to see it done in a good Irish pub anywhere in the world, with a beat-up upright piano and four singers in street clothes moving in and around the patrons as they enact the story.

My pre-compositional Process has never changed. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect what I intend to do to it musically, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils-say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to 'track' also get colors. Standing with a glass of wine and dreaming on the entire act is as close as I'm likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

A fully-realized trittico called New York Stories with libretti by me and the New York playwright Barbara Grecki followed. Three twenty-minute-long slices of life for a man and woman each, the individual titles were Broken Pieces (about a woman of a certain age who shares a piquant romantic moment with a tile man when he comes to fix her bathroom), Just for the Night (about a bag man who barges in, uninvited on his sister on Christmas Eve, and is turned away), and Cradle Song (a portrait of my wife and myself when our son was about six months old, a young couple trying to get their infant child down at the end of an evening on the town).

Once the entire opera is 'on the wall' I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the 'emotional nuclear reactors') are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose 'from left to right.' I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

In Amelia, a two act opera written with Gardner McFall and Stephen Wadsworth for Seattle Opera, a first time mother-to-be, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in Vietnam, must break free from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband and child in this original story unfolding over a 30-year period beginning in 1966. Amelia interweaves one woman's emotional journey, the American experience in Vietnam, and elements of the Daedalus and Icarus myth to explore man's fascination with flight and the dilemmas that arise when vehicles of flight are used for exploration, adventure, and war. The opera moves from loss to recuperation, paralysis to flight, as the protagonist, Amelia, ultimately embraces her life and the creative force of love and family.

I believe in workshops. But I also believe that if an opera fails, the ultimate blame is the composer's, so he, and not the stage director or librettist, should be the pilot.

***

'Most pieces,' Virgil Thomson once quipped, 'withdraw themselves.'

I've always believed that it is a composer's job to write music, not to waste energy thinking about whether that music will be of use after he is dead. Nevertheless, at a certain point, one has to acknowledge one's strengths and work from them.

After thirty years studying, attending, composing, and coaching opera, I have begun to finally realize that I am only barely beginning to understand what writing one entails. One successfully produced opera is a composer's visa at the border; two means you've bought property. I'm not certain how many operas one has to write before citizenship in the opera world is earned; I only know that every time I finish one I feel further away from understanding how to make one.

My vocal music in general and my operas in particular have engaged me the most intensely, made on the repertoire the closest thing to a lasting mark. Yes, 'all that we see or seem,' as Poe wrote, may be a 'dream within a dream,' but—given my choice—there's no place I'd rather spend my dreamtime than in a darkened theater, observing as the magnificent human and mechanical apparatus of an opera company in motion brings one of my operas to life.