p/c: Karen Pearson
Daron Hagen (b. 1961) occupies a unique position in American music as both an internationally distinguished concert music and opera composer and as a pioneering auteur composer-director-writer-editor of operafilm, a genre in which he weaves together aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music, drama, film, and their performance practices to manifest narrative. Along with screenings at festivals, his Bardo Trilogy operafilms are broadly laureled and viewable worldwide on major streamers including Amazon Prime Video. His book Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy will be published in April 2026 by McFarland and Company.
His music has been commissioned steadily for five decades by world-class ensembles and institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Seattle Opera, and is perennially programmed worldwide. His collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Marni Nixon, Sidney Outlaw, Gerard Schwarz, Paul Sperry, and Gore Vidal. His memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019.
Founding Artistic Director of the New Mercury Collective, he has taught at Bard, Curtis, the Chicago College of Performing Arts and the Princeton Atelier, served as Artistic Director and Chair of Faculty for the Seasons Festival (2005-13), President of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation (2003-2008), and adjudicated for the NEA, ASCAP, NATS, and Opera America, among others. A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo and Guggenheim Fellow, he has received two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowships, the Bogliasco and Camargo Fellowships, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, NEA and Opera America grants, and two American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards.
Recorded on Naxos and Sony, published by Peermusic Classical, represented by Encompass Arts, a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard, he and Gilda Lyons have two children.