Daron Hagen is an auteur polymath whose practice synthesizes composition, literature, and visual narrative into a unified, multi-modal medium. By exercising total authorship, he commands the entire creative arc of his internationally streaming “operafilms,” meta-modernist gesamtkunstwerks such as The Bardo Trilogy, serving simultaneously as composer, librettist, director, and editor. His extensive catalogue comprises 14 operas, 6 symphonies, 14 concertos, over 500 art songs, and three operafilms, alongside an interlocking literary canon including the memoir Duet With the Past, the treatise Exploring Operafilm, and the forthcoming novel The Rosebud Row.

Early associations with mentors and collaborators like Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Lukas Foss, David Diamond, and Gore Vidal informed his creative path. Following studies at the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, his independent trajectory has yielded landmark commissions from The Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Opera, the College Band Directors National Association, and The King's Singers. He has created milestone anniversary works for the New York Philharmonic's 150th, the Buffalo Philharmonic's 90th, ASCAP's 75th, and The Cecilia Chorus of New York for the United Nations’ 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His work features close creative partnerships with prominent virtuosos and literary collaborators including Gerard Schwarz, JoAnn Falletta, Paul Muldoon, Stephen Wadsworth, J.D. McClatchy, Gary Graffman, and Kate Lindsey.

A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo and founding artistic director of the New Mercury Collective, Hagen is a Guggenheim Fellow whose honors include two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center Friedheim, ASCAP-Nissim, and Columbia University Bearns Prizes. His work is further sustained by international residencies from the Rockefeller, Camargo, and Bogliasco foundations. Hagen lives and works in Upstate New York.

[275 words; Sept. 2026]