Daron Aric Hagen (born November 4, 1961, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American composer of contemporary classical music and opera. He studied composition at the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and privately with Leonard Bernstein.

Life

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The youngest of the three sons of Gwen Hagen (an artist and advertising executive) and Earl Hagen (an attorney), Hagen began composing prolifically in 1974, when his older brother gave him a recording and score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he conducted the premiere of his first orchestral work, a recording and score of which came to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who enthusiastically urged Hagen to attend Juilliard to study with David Diamond. After two years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by three years of study with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Hagen moved to New York City in 1984 to complete his formal education as a student of Diamond’s at Juilliard. After graduating, Hagen lived abroad briefly, first at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and then at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. When he returned to the United States, Hagen studied privately with Bernstein, whose guidance during the composition of Hagen's Shining Brow (1992) — the opera that launched Hagen's career internationally — prompted him to dedicate the score to Bernstein’s memory.

His first composition to attract wide attention was Prayer for Peace, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1981. The New York Philharmonic commissioned Philharmonia for its 150th anniversary in 1990. Hagen's numerous commissions from major orchestras and performers between 1981 and 2005 included orchestral works, three symphonies, seven concertos (for Gary Graffman and Sara Sant'Ambrogio, among others), several massive works for chorus and orchestra, two dozen choral works, ballet scores, concert overtures, showpieces, two brass quintets, two piano trios, a string quartet, an oboe quintet, a duo for violin and cello, solo works for piano, organ, violin, viola, and cello, and seventeen published cycles of art songs. In 1990 Hagen began a creative collaboration with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon that resulted in four major operas: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005).

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