Selected Reviews

Hagen is a masterful writer and musician. Here, [I Hear America Singing] his music evokes the American canon: traditional hymns, ballads, love songs, story songs, and patriotic. The songs themselves could be a stand-alone recital, from art songs to arias and other popular forms. Considering the score alone, the show is a testament to how a composer learns and applies their own experiences of life and others’ music. Some beautiful American melodies are referenced with nuance in this lovely study about songwriting and singing.

—Yvonne Hudson, onStage Pittsburgh, 11 May 2024

Note

House to Half was finished on November 5th, 1980, in Madison, Wisconsin. With lyrics by Ed Flesch, it served as the opening number of a revue of the same name produced by the UW-Madison Opera and directed by Karlos Moser. The show ran for five performances during January 1981.

I’ve Never Wanted Anyone Before is drawn from the musical Together, for which I contributed book, lyrics, and music in July and August 1976 in New Berlin, Wisconsin. I revised the song at Yaddo during September 1998, adding a B section and a bridge, after playing and singing the original version on a dare for New York theatrical producer and arts advocate Harold Reed, who commissioned a revised version, which I introduced at a private salon at his home later that fall. In 2024 I revised it again and folded it into the score of the operafilm I Hear America Singing.

During winter 2013 and the early months of 2014 I wrote the score, lyrics and book on commission from the Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for I Hear America Singing, which had a month-long commercial run during March 2014. Three songs are included from that musical, (And Then) I Let Him Go, based on the folk tune Liza Jane, Remember How it Was? (a duet in the show, revised to be a solo song for this collection), and I Believe in Song.

Follows a song from the 2015 opera A Woman in Morocco, a verismo two act noir about a young American writer who comes to Morocco during the late 50s to write about human trafficking and falls prey to a pair of men whose illegal activities she is on the verge of exposing. Love Comes With a Knife reoccurs throughout the opera at key moments, emanating from an onstage shortwave radio and sung by a “nightclub singer” named Minerva Mudd. The lyric is adapted from a poem by the great 13th century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī.

Listening to Learn is a little “I am” arietta for soubrette from 9/10: Love Before the Fall. Ferry Me Across the Water, from 9/10: Love Before the Fall, is a setting of the poem by Christina Rosetti woven throughout the score, heard on the radio in an Italian bistro on the night before the attack on the Twin Towers.