ABOUT THE BOOK
Composer, conductor and operatic polymath Daron Hagen has written five symphonies, a dozen concertos, 13 operas, reams of chamber music and more than 350 art songs. His intimate, unsparing memoir chronicles his life, from his haunted childhood in Wisconsin to the upper echelons of the music world in New York and Europe. Hagen’s vivid anecdotes about his many collaborators, friends and mentors—including Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Gian Carlo Menotti, Paul Muldoon, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson and Gore Vidal—counterpoint a cautionary tale of the sacrifices necessary to succeed in the brutally unforgiving business of classical music.
PRAISE
“Duet with the Past is an unsparing and bleakly beautiful memoir from composer, conductor and operatic polymath Daron Hagen that takes him from his haunted childhood in Wisconsin to the upper echelons of musical life in New York and Europe. It is rich intellectual history, filled with privileged anecdotes about legends and near-legends, but especially valuable for the narrative candor of the author, who has seen much and taken care to remember it all for us, no matter how it may ache.” — Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, editor, biographer, memoirist, University of Southern California
“It is a rare privilege to experience a glimpse into the inner world of a great artist, and Daron Hagen has opened the door to his life in a memoir of searing honesty and unguarded intimacy. Daron leads us through a journey that begins in a brilliant, talented but dysfunctional family, into the treacherous depths of the ruthless competition and political machinations of the classical music scene, to a search for a happiness that often seems unattainable. Filled with anecdotes of countless musical luminaries, Duet with the Past is irresistible in its revealing candor and charm- an unforgettable journey into the private world of one of our country’s greatest composers.” — JoAnn Falletta, conductor Buffalo Philharmonic
“At times tragic or melancholic, the memoir unsparingly confronts the downward spiral of a family blighted by alcoholism and early, preventable death and the unhappy denouement of an impulsively entered-into marriage. But it also celebrates his worshipful love for his talented mother, second wife Gilda (a composer and singer), and sons Atticus and Seamus, that helped him overcome his self-destructive, depressive tendencies as he gradually transformed himself into a ‘humane and mostly happy man.’ … Late in the book, Hagen reflects that ‘a biographer pursues his subject’s truth by marching facts down the page after it like little soldiers, while an artist interlaces life’s storylines and dreams, pleating and plaiting memory and associations until one’s truth emerges as a braid.’ Arresting though the story is as it ‘marches’ more or less chronologically through the years, it’s the artistically woven warp and weft of his life’s tapestry that lingers. — Robert Schulslaper, Fanfare Magazine
“[Hagen] takes a balanced inventory of his days and in the process he delivers a cogent depiction of an era of music.” — Times Union
“Fascinating… Feels like an earlier part of American musical history… The book is a brave, revealing, and touching enterprise.” — James Primosch, composer, Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music, the University of Pennsylvania
“In an age suffused with memoir, it is rare indeed to read a book that is both ruthlessly honest and beautifully written. Duet with the Past is not only the chronicle of a brilliant young man who survived a family that, for decades, was haunted by death; it is also a cautionary tale that shows, with painful accuracy, the sacrifices needed to maintain a classical-music career in a brutally unforgiving business. Every young American composer should read it.” — Russell Platt, composer and ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning music critic, Vanderbilt University.
“If Daron Hagen weren’t a composer, he would be one hell of a writer. He IS one hell of a writer. I already knew that, but I finally got around to reading his memoir, Duet with the Past, last month, and I have to say, it is one of the best-written books, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve read in a while. … He's not afraid to share his missteps, but if nothing else his life story demonstrates that even when you bottom-out, if you just hang in there, things might work out all right in the end. Talent and hard work are important, but luck, or chance, if you will, will always be a deciding factor. … Hagen can be nostalgic and hardnosed, pensive and reckless, ugly and beautiful, vainglorious and modest. But who among us has not been? He writes with all five senses. Proust had his madeleine; Hagen had… well, everything apparently. We’ve all had the experience of certain scents conjuring memories, but Hagen, it seems, never forgot a smell, whether it be that of a dusty curtain in an old movie house or that distinctive blend of aromas that characterize any city. You can tell he’s always been a faithful journaler, which is only one more thing to admire. … Not that the subject matter is always delightful. Hagen can be brutally honest, and it’s not always pretty. But in his writing, as in his music, he is dedicated to serving truth. He does so with enviable recall, a powerful command of observation, often great sensitivity, and a poetic disposition.” — Classic Ross Amico, Syndicated Radio Host and Producer, WMUH, WXLV, and WWFM
“Autobiography, memoir, confessional: Hagen’s book is all of these things. It offers a candid telling of his personal story, at times heart-breaking, at times positively inspirational. It tells of a composer’s quest for truth, of a composer’s struggles in a highly competitive world; it offers illumination into a whole clutch of composers, but most revealingly the close ties Hagen has enjoyed with Ned Rorem, Lukas Foss, Leonard Bernstein, and David Diamond. … Hagen’s descriptions of others are vivid and come with an inbuilt ring of truth. They can be poetic, too. Of Diamond, he writes that, ‘he was a superb artisan whose Neo-classic compositions grafted intense lyricism with a neurotic and deeply felt hyper-contrapuntal style … like Witold Lutosławski, David wore excellently tailored suits … ‘ and so it goes on. His description of clearing out his deceased father’s belongings as ‘the melancholy triage of Executorship’ seems to exude a particular poignance. … Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give is that the book is riveting from first to last; and I write his as no regular reader of autobiographies. In short, it is a fabulous, revealing, and sometimes revelatory read, a window into a sometimes-tortured soul with what feels like a happy ending (Hagen was born in 1961, so one hopes for much more happiness to come).” – Colin Clark, Fanfare Magazine
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 279
Bibliographic Info: 27 photos, discography, index
Copyright Date: 2019
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7737-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3587-3
Imprint: McFarland
ABOUT THE BOOK
Operafilm is a new word for an emerging, auteur-led gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which music, film, and performance are combined to sustain intellectually and aesthetically coherent metamodernist narratives. In this form of storytelling, every element, including score, image, and performance, is given equal attention.
Daron Hagen is the first to compose, write, storyboard, direct, and edit full-length operafilms, shifting authorship away from screenwriters and towards the “auteur composer-director” that embodies the depth of the genre. Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy offers an exploration of operafilm, conjuring the inner life of Orson Welles at his moment of death, a magical-realist last supper with four New Yorkers on the eve of 9/11, and the final days of a composer who sees song and life as a cosmic audition. This book explores the origins of the emerging genre, highlighting Hagen’s own process as the single screenwriter, director, and composer of the works discussed.
PRAISE
“A spectacular plea for operafilms, Exploring Operafilm — just the sort of memoir-essay I like about how one works, makes, and creates. …and using the notion of auteurism to re-situate the creative process from the ‘book’ writer to the composer driven and directed total film.” — Craig Saper, Professor of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program, UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland
“Read all through the night. One high note after the other. Hagen is the professional’s professional. As literary as he is musical, he bridges the gap between two tribes. How this book does soar!” — Benjamin Taylor, award-winning author of Here We Are and President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.
“This majestic volume deeply explores the exciting new form called operafilm by its original practitioner. It combines the visual and musical vocabulary of opera, drama, and film in profound and original ways. Hagen reveals the deep and literate relationships, sometimes spanning across decades, that bring together every element of his operafilms—even, for instance, a paragraph where Schoenberg’s string quartets are related to Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin.’ The prose is both rich with detail and conversational, and it is a fascinating read.” — David Rakowski, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition, Brandeis University
“Hagen moves energetically from a spot on appraisal of Angelo Badalamenti’s importance in shaping the operatic visions of David Lynch to hands on advice about how a film composer navigates post production in a book that is bound to engage filmmakers and composers of all kinds, as well as cinephiles and film theorists.” — Miles Hankins, film composer and producer, A Quiet Place, Long Shot, and Burn Notice
“A fascinating travelogue of Daron Hagen’s journey from composer/librettist/conductor to composer/librettist/conductor/director, from lyric theatre to operafilm. The terminus of the ten-year expedition is Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy, three operafilms in which the visual, musical, textual and staging ideas are generated simultaneously by Hagen and then directed and film edited by him. He navigates using an encyclopedic knowledge of masters and masterpieces in fields ranging from cinematography to theology to psychology to music theory and across centuries from ancient to (post-?) modern. The writing manifests a deep understanding and humble respect for those who have journeyed before or with him in a quest to understand the ways in which art helps us discover personal truths and grapple with the universal mysteries that pulse in all our hearts. Hagen’s boundless imagination and insatiable curiosity ― so evident in all of his music ― leap from every page of Exploring Operafilm.” ― Rudy Marcozzi, professor and dean emeritus, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University
“Hagen has crafted something genuinely post-genre, a work that honors opera, indie cinema, and documentary while subordinating all three to a fiercer commitment: bearing witness to the artist as mortal being, to creativity as both salvation and self-immolation. In an era of algorithmic content and demographic targeting, Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy stands as bracing proof that cinema can still be alchemical, dangerous, genuinely new. This is operafilm as terminal diagnosis and love letter, Whitman’s America singing itself into beautiful, necessary extinction.” ― Adrián Pérez, founder and festival director of Lonely Wolf International Film Festival
“The combination of ingredients, flavors, and the need for posterity of the cinematic, theatrical and musical kind come together as the highest form of art: entertainment and education all at once. A fan of Daron’s operafilms, I’ve now become a fan of his thoughtful dissertation on the history of a very particular art form, his Exploring Operafilm but also of his very present and active way of explaining the making of art itself. Exploring Operafilm is a must have and a must read for opera lovers, cinema lovers, [and] art lovers..” ― Hershey Felder, filmmaker, actor, pianist, composer, producer, and playwright
“Daron Hagen knows music, he knows the theatre, he knows movies and TV — and, in Exploring Operafilm, collects his hard-earned observations on all of them as a primer for new leaders in the field to consult. Technologically astute, but drawing on a century of tradition, Hagen’s book, focused on three of his groundbreaking works, is a duet with the future, a restless remaking of the eternal possibilities inherent in the combination of word, vision, and sound. — Russell Platt, composer, Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music
“In this essential exploration of the ‘operafilm,’ Daron Hagen proves that opera is not a museum piece, but a living language. Having produced Hagen’s Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow at Arizona Opera, I have seen firsthand the rigor and theatrical instinct he brings to the stage; now, he brings that same vision to the screen. Combining intellectual depth with technical fluency, Hagen builds a new container for musical-dramatic storytelling—one that captures the potency and intimacy of film without losing the soul of the aria. This book is a timely manifesto for the future of the art form, written by an artist who isn’t just expanding the boundaries of opera, but redefining them for us all.”—Joseph Specter, president and chief executive officer, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; former president and general director, Arizona Opera
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 258
Bibliographic Info: ca. 5 photos, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2025
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9956-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5807-0
Imprint: McFarland