That is, they think and act like real people, with all the social and personal chaos that suggests. The miracle of Shining Brow is that such a taut and gripping form rises from such chaos. Form follows feeling. Musical motives and keys associated with characters and situations rise from the flow and take on meaning and resonance parallel to the text repetitions. And those motives and keys overlap to make dramatic conflict live in musical sound. Hagen's baseline idiom seems to be modernist-expressionist, tonal but freely dissonant. He sets all sorts of influences, from barbershop to ticky-tick dance music against that idiom, to underscore character and crystallize the period (1903-'14). Wright and the chorus of draftsmen sing in a sort of Romantic Anglican church style, which the draftsmen satirize behind Wright's back. The same goes for the spacious, Copland-Americana song of the construction workers.

In the finale, when the Maid undercuts Wright's lament with a song like a mouth full of nails, we remember how amusingly he was undercut earlier. The contrast touches us all the more deeply. This fine new opera, this Shining Brow, will be repeated at 8 p.m. Friday and 2:30 pm Sunday...

Madison Opera has come up a winner in the tricky business of commissioning operas: Daron Hagen and Paul Muldoon, composer and librettist of the exciting new Shining Brow, neither of whom has written an opera before, bring fresh ideas to their work -- based on an incident in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. The great American architect and Taliesin (Welsh for Shining Brow), the home he built for himself in Wisconsin, share the center of the story. The remarkable quality of Muldoon's libretto is quickly evident.... Like Dominick Argento, Hagen writes particularly well for the voice. The vocal burden falls on Wright -- a plummy role for lyric baritone, marvelously sung and acted by Michael Sokol -- and Mamah, a no less juicy spinto soprano role, beautifully realized by velvet-toned Carolann Page. Each of these characters has an affecting soliloquy, splendidly crafted to display a huge emotional and vocal range, and each singer made the most of the opportunity.... A full, enthusiastic house closed the production (April 25) with a standing ovation.

Hagen's music makes no errors. And like the stronger stretches in the theater and concert music of, say, Dominick Argento and John Harbison, he sustains the idea of non-minimalist tonality as a still-viable medium. Hagen can also use musical quotations from the past wittily without sounding opportunistic. The word 'Utopia,' for example, is punched at you suddenly on the notes of 'Suburbia' from Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, a motif that Bernstein himself lifted from the opening phrase of "New York, New York" in his own On the Town. The homage is appropriate since Hagen got much advice from Bernstein and dedicated Shining Brow to his memory.

And it's only justice that Hagen zeroed in on that chronic self-borrower, Richard Strauss, to construct a party-scene trio of on-stage piano, violin, and cello and occupy them with a chain of variations (including ersatz-jazz segments) on a couple [sic] of tunes from Der Rosenkavalier. Furthermore, Hagen wasn't above musicalizing some loud-mouthed reporters as a barbershop quartet. (He hopes for good reviews?) [Late in the opera, Wright and Sullivan] meet for a painful reconciliation; they stand motionless and leave it to the orchestra to pour out softly Hagen's most moving music. The show was an event.

Commissioning new work is risky business, for even the largest and most established opera companies. But American opera is on a roll ... Shining Brow proved to be an absorbing, beautiful staged work. Sullivan's design maxim, 'Form follows function,' was evoked throughout the opera. But Hagen's spare, evocative score demonstrated the truth of another famous architect's rule, Mies van der Rohe's 'Less is more,' The orchestral writing was austere and carefully placed as the beams in Wright's homes. Hagen and Muldoon managed to turn a debate about order in the universe into a riveting operatic scene.

Muldoon's libretto is one of the few one may actually want to take home and study as literature. The vocal lines might remind some of Benjamin Britten, and at lighter moments, even of Stephen Sondheim. Though sometimes difficult, and with wide leaps, it does not tear at the voices, but favors them. Similarly, the orchestral score ... closely supports, rather than fights, both the singers and the drama.

Shining Brow is a powerful, perfect liaison of music and words.

This [is a] stunning new American opera. The music is splendid with haunting tonal intensity, and as down to earth as a barbershop quartet.

Daron Aric Hagen's music was quite in tune with the drama of [Wright's life].

Hagen's lyrically sensitive, multilayered score deals in shifting tonal centers and textures that mirror various 'realities' in the lives of the opera's characters.

Operas that are essentially interior dramas have always been difficult to bring off in the theater -- but not impossible, as Daron Hagen's and Paul Muldoon's Shining Brow, now playing in Chicago, makes clear.

Chicago Opera Theater's performances of Shining Brow ... were a triumph.

[Shining Brow] is a daring venture on the part of several bright young talents. The entire enterprise exuded intelligence. Mr. Hagen has a gift for the big tune, and he serves up some beauties in the choruses, evoking the blues and a Colonial hymn. Mr. Hagen is most interesting when he assaults the ear roundly or falls squarely back on tradition. The musical texture is well varied and consistently engaging. Mr. Muldoon's libretto and Mr. Birn's design, excellent and involving in themselves, accord well with Mr. Hagen's style. One scene in particular, evoking a disastrous news conference held by Wright on Christmas 1911 to explain his relationship to Cheney despite his continuing marriage to Catherine, was utterly brilliant.

Hagen and Muldoon crafted their opera with much the same eye on the unity-within-variety that was basic to Wright's own aesthetic... From the evidence of Shining Brow, the Milwaukee-born Hagen is a composer born to write operas. Hagen uses various keys to identify the principal players -- B-flat for Wright, E major for Mamah, and so forth -- sometimes merging them in ingenious polytonal passages that mirror these characters' shifting emotional states. There are also deliberate references to older music, including a quotation from Der Rosenkavalier, which Wright and Cheney saw in its world premiere in Berlin in 1911. Hagen gives his singers gratifying flights of lyrical expansion, but his score is all of a piece, underscoring the drama and propelling it forward. Particularily impressive are the choral ensembles that support the two acts of the opera like firm musical pillars. Shining Brow offers further evidence that the salvation of American opera will come not necessarily from the big East Coast companies but from enterprising regional theaters like Madison's. One hopes other companies will mount productions of their own.

From the evidence of Shining Brow, Daron Hagen is a composer born to write operas. His shifting tonal centers neatly mirror the shifting emotional realities of his characters, while his integration of various "found" musics (barbershop quartet here, fake Copland there) into a seamless, always singable flow is expert. The work is a natural for the Chicago Lyric Opera's "21st Century" program. It is an opera any major opera company could present with pride.

It is Carleton [the murderous Taliesin chef] who, on the plot level, is responsible for the culminating catastrophe, the burning of Taliesin with Mamah and her children inside [sic], and who, below the plot, challenges the other characters with the certainty and uniqueness of his language. To emphasize the point, this language is spoken -- or rather, declaimed -- while the orchestra stays silent. Mr. Hagen's nobility is to leave Carleton's self-statement outside the purlieu of music.... Mr. Hagen is a wizard at ornamentation, at form without function, at rhapsodic revellings in rhapsodic Strauss, at A-minor monologues, at perky orchestration, at blues and hymn and barbershop.

...The publicity surrounding the [premiere of Shining Brow] has been credited with indirectly influencing the passage of a local bond referendum authorizing the building of a local convention center designed by Wright many years previously. Shining Brow is a considerable artistic achievement of uncompromising seriousness -- one which found favor with those Wright admirers with whom I spoke for its accurate picture of some unlikely events. Hagen's compositional ability is a decided asset. He is, first of all, an exceptional orchestrator, and the variety of sounds from the pit -- from full orchestra to combination of instruments -- attests to an extremely acute ear for sonority. One hopes that Shining Brow will be heard again." - Patrick Smith, The Times Literary Supplement 5/15/93