Richard Hageman was born inLeeuwarden,Friesland,Netherlands. He was the son of Maurits Hageman ofZutphen, a violinist, pianist and conductor, and of Hester Westerhoven ofAmsterdam, a singer who performed under the name Francisca Stoetz.[1] A child prodigy, he was a concert pianist by the age of six. He studied at the conservatories ofAmsterdam andBrussels.[1] As a young man he was an accompanist for singers and with theNederlandsche Opera, which he conducted for the first time in 1899. He became the artistic director briefly in 1903, the same year in which he married the soprano Rosina van Ophemert, who took the stage name Rosina van Dyke/van Dyck (Rosina van Dijk was the maiden name of her grandmother).[2][3] For a short time Hageman was accompanist toMathilde Marchesi inParis.[4] He travelled to theUnited States in 1906 to accompanyYvette Guilbert on a national tour. He stayed and eventually became an American citizen in 1925.[5] Rosina sang at theMetropolitan Opera, but the couple had an acrimonious divorce in 1916.[6] His second and third wives were also sopranos—Renee Thornton and Eleanore Rogers.[7]
He was a conductor and pianist for theMetropolitan Opera between 1908 and 1922, and 1935-1936, coach of the opera department at theCurtis Institute from 1925 to 1930, and music director of theChicago Civic Opera and theRavinia Park Opera for seven years. Hageman was a coach in voice and collaborative at theChicago Musical College in the 1920s,[8] where one of his notable piano students wasRay Turner, who went on to play with thePaul Whiteman Orchestra, worked as the staff pianist atParamount Studios for over 20 years, and was a popular recording and concert artist.
He is known to the film community for his work as an actor and film score composer, most notably for his work on severalJohn Ford films in the late 1930s and after the war in the late 1940s. He shared anAcademy Award for his score to Ford's 1939 westernStagecoach and was nominated for the score ofThis Woman Is Mine (1941).[10]He played minor roles in eleven movies, for example as opera conductor Carlo Santi inThe Great Caruso. He became a member ofASCAP in 1950.[9]
Hageman composed some larger concert works for voice. His 1931operaCaponsacchi, first performed inFreiburg with the titleTragödie in Arezzo in 1932, was staged at theMetropolitan Opera in 1937[4] withMario Chamlee in the title role.[11] His "concert drama"The Crucible was performed inLos Angeles in 1943.[12] While his large musical compositions are rarely heard today, a few of hisart songs are well-known and highly regarded, especially "Do Not Go, My Love", a setting of aRabindranath Tagore poem.
He was a National Patron ofDelta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.[13] He died, aged 84, inBeverly Hills.
Hageman is credited for the scores of about 20 films, and his compositions have been used in many additional films.[16]
Seven of the scores were for films directed byJohn Ford; Kathryn Marie Kalinak has written that Ford "got great work out of the people he worked with, and often those he was hardest on produced the best work of their careers. One of those was Richard Hageman, the Philadelphia Orchestra notwithstanding."[17]
^De Villiers, N. and Walthaus, A. (2015) Making the Tailcoats Fit: The life and music of Richard Hageman. Leeuwarden, The Netherlands: Uitgeverij Wijdemeer
de Villiers, Nico and Asing Walthaus (2015).Making the Tailcoats Fit: the life and music of Richard Hageman. Leeuwarden: Wijdemeer.ISBN978-9492052162.
de Villiers, Nico, Kathryn Kalinak, and Asing Walthaus (2020).Richard Hageman: From Holland to Hollywood (paperback ed.). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.ISBN978-1-4331-5581-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Miller, Philip Lieson (1992), "Hageman, Richard", in Sadie, Stanley (ed.),The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 2, London: Macmillan Press Ltd., p. 594
