Hageman was born and raised in Leeuwarden, Friesland, Netherlands. He was the son of the Maurits Hageman of Zutphen, a violinist, pianist and conductor, and of Hester Westerhoven of Amsterdam, a singer who performed under the name Francisca Stoetz. A child prodigy, he was a concert pianist by the age of six. He studied at the conservatories of Amsterdam and Brussels. As a young man he was an accompanist for singers and with the Nederlandsche Opera, of which he conducted for the first time in 1899. He became the artistic director briefly in 1903, the same year he married the soprano Rosina van Ophemert, who took the stage name Rosina van Dyke/van Dyck. For a short time he was accompanist to Mathilde Marchesi in Paris. He travelled to the United States in 1906 to accompany Yvette Guilbert on a national tour. He stayed and eventually became an American citizen in 1925. Rosina sang at the Metropolitan Opera, but the couple had an acrimonious divorce in 1916. He was a conductor and pianist for the Metropolitan Opera between 1908 and 1922, and 1935-1936, coach of the opera department at the Curtis Institute from 1925 to 1930, and music director of the Chicago Civic Opera and the Ravinia Park Opera for seven years. He was a guest director of orchestras like the Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles symphony orchestras. He conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra summer concerts for four years, and from 1938-1943 he conducted at the Hollywood Bowl summer concerts. He is known to the film community for his work as an actor and film score composer, most notably for his work on several John Ford films in the late 1930s and after the war in the late 1940s. He shared an Academy Award for his score to Ford's 1939 western Stagecoach. He played minor roles in eleven movies, for example as opera conductor Carlo Santi in The Great Caruso. He became a member of ASCAP in 1950. Hageman also composed more serious vocal music. His 1931 opera Caponsacchi, first performed in Freiburg with the title Tragödie in Arezzo in 1932, was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in 1937 with Mario Chamlee in the title role. His "concert drama" The Crucible was performed in Los Angeles in 1943. While his large musical compositions are rarely heard today, a few of his art songs are well-known and highly regarded, especially "Do Not Go, My Love", a setting of a Rabindranath Tagore poem. He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity. He died, aged 84, in Beverly Hills.
Under the Willows: Shoshone love song, G. Schirmer, 1957
When the Wind is Low, Galaxy, 1957
Die Stadt/The Town, G. Schirmer, 1958
Betterliebe/Beggar's Love, G. Schirmer, 1958
Am Himmelstor/At Heaven's Door, G. Schirmer, 1958
Nocturne, G. Schirmer, 1960
So love returns,, Ricordi, 1960
Film scores
Hageman is credited for the scores of about 20 films, and his compositions have been used in many additional films. Seven of the scores were for films directed by John 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."
