Amelia

Daron Aric Hagen, Composer

Daron Aric Hagen makes his Seattle Opera debut composing the company’s first commissioned work under General Director Speight Jenkins’ tenure, Amelia, which premieres in May 2010. Hagen has composed five previous operas: The Antient Concert, Bandanna, New York Stories, Vera of Las Vegas, and Shining Brow. Besides his opera career, he is also a prolific composer of more than 200 compositions, vocal and orchestral soloists, and choirs, which can be heard on numerous recordings. Hagen has created commissioned works for the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, National Symphony, Tanglewood Music Festival, Philadelphia Orchestra and the King’s Singers, among others. He has served as Composer in Residence for the Princeton University Atelier, Chicago Conservatory of Music, University of Pittsburgh, and Miami University. Artistic Director of the Seasons Music Festival in Yakima, Washington, Hagen will serve as Composer in Residence for the 2009 Wintergreen and Methow music festivals, among others. Hagen is a lifetime member of the Corporation of Yaddo and past president of the Lotte Lehman Foundation. He has received such honors as the Kennedy Center Friedheim, among many others. Hagen, who is also active as a conductor and pianist, made his stage directorial debut with the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2006, and has since staged three of his operas in major venues.

Gardner McFall, Librettist

Poet Gardner McFall makes her Seattle Opera debut writing the libretto for Daron Aric Hagen’s Amelia. Her first book of poems, The Pilot’s Daughter, was an elegy for her father who was lost in training for his second tour of duty in Vietnam. McFall’s poems have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Southwest Review, The Nation, The Sewanee Review, and The Paris Review, among others. She has received a Discovery/The Nation award, and her work in The Missouri Review was awarded the Thomas McAfee prize for poetry. McFall is the author of two children’s books; her second book of poems, Russian Tortoise, will be published in the spring of 2009 by Time Being Books. She is the editor of May Swenson’s prose miscellany, Made with Words, and recently wrote the introduction and notes for a new edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. McFall received her M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. from New York University. She currently teaches in the English department of Hunter College in New York City.

Stephen Wadsworth, Story Author and Director

Stephen Wadsworth has directed productions for the Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Vienna Staatsoper, Nederlandse Opera, Edinburgh Festival, and in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Santa Fe. He made his Seattle Opera debut in 1985 with Janácek’s Jenufa; other Seattle Opera credits include Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris and Orphée et Eurydice, Handel’s Xerxes, and Wagner’s Lohengrin, Fliegende Holländer, and the 2009 Ring. Wadsworth recently directed Agamemnon with Tyne Daly and Delroy Lindo in Los Angeles, and his productions of plays by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Molière, Marivaux, Goldoni, Shaw, Wilde, and Coward, a number of which have played at Seattle Repertory Theatre (where he was an Affiliate Artist from 1998 to 2004), have established him as a master of the classical repertoire. Wadsworth wrote the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein, and served as dramaturg and director for the world premieres of Daron Aric Hagen’s Shining Brow and Peter Lieberson’s Ashoka’s Dream. He has translated and adapted a number of works for the stage, including operas by Monteverdi, Handel, and Mozart and plays by Molière, Marivaux, and Goldoni. He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his literary achievement as a writer and scholar on works of Molière and Marivaux. Wadsworth is the James S. Marcus Faculty Fellow at the Juilliard School and Head of Dramatic Studies at the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program.