p/c: Karen Pearson
Daron Hagen (b. 1961) is an American composer, writer, and filmmaker who established the operafilm genre. His Bardo Trilogy — comprising Orson Rehearsed, 9/10: Love Before the Fall, and I Hear America Singing — streams worldwide, is distributed on Amazon Prime Video, and is theorized in his book, Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy, scheduled for release by McFarland in March 2026.
Across five decades, Hagen has composed 13 operas, 5 symphonies, 12 concerti, and more than 250 art songs. His works have been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Opera, among others. Collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Gerard Schwarz, and Gore Vidal.
A Guggenheim Fellow and Lifetime Member of Yaddo, Hagen is founding director of the New Mercury Collective. His honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residencies, Bogliasco, Camargo, MacDowell, and VCCA fellowships, two American Academy of Arts and Letters awards, and prizes from Columbia University, ASCAP, the Barlow Endowment, and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award.
He has approached pedagogy as a form of artistic citizenship in posts and residencies at Bard College, Curtis, NYU, the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton Atelier, UNLV, and the Chicago College of Performing Arts. His critically acclaimed memoir Duet with the Past intertwines personal narrative with reflections on creativity and collaboration. Recorded on Naxos, Sony, and others, published by Peermusic Classical, and represented by Encompass Arts, Hagen studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Curtis, and Juilliard, and continues to create and direct from his home in upstate New York. As Ned Rorem wrote in Opera News, “To say that Daron Hagen is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music.”