Kazuko Hara, who is famous as a composer of opera, was born in Tokyo on February 10 in 1935. She majored in composition and studied with Tomojirō Ikenouchi at Tokyo University of the Arts. Hara took part in the organization of ‘Shinshin-kai’, a Japanese group of composers, and she married Hiroshi Hara who was a member of the same group. From 1962 to 1964, Hara devoted herself to studies in Paris and Venice where she studied composition under H. Dutilleux and A. Tcherepnin. Hara moreover studied vocal music under P. Bernac and I. A. Corradetti. From 1968, Hara became a professor at Osaka Geijutsu Daigaku (Osaka University of Arts) and was later employed as a professor at Dōshisha Joshi Daigaku (Dōshisha Woman’s College).

Although she also wrote various piano works and vocal pieces, the activity of Hara to which people in particular have drawn their attention is her compositions for opera in the Japanese language. Starting with the work “Chieko-shō” (1978), Hara composed opera music from the perspective of women and society. She wrote various dramatic operas with particular patterns of sounds guiding the leitmotifs which effectively integrate the psychology and scenery of the characters. Hara’s oeuvre includes pieces based on the case files of Sherlock Homes and “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoyevsky, but many of her operas treated Japanese folk songs and dialects at the commission from local regions. “Yosakoi-bushi”, for example, describes a tragic love story in the Tosa region during the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, and other works of Hara’s of a similar kind include “Nukata no Ōkimi”, “Ao no Dōmon” and “Byakuren”. Hara received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2001, and in 2006 she was awarded The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette. Hara continued composing opera until her death on November 30 in 2014, and she completed in total 18 opera pieces. It was the close attachment to the Japanese language and the strong concern with dramaturgy that spurred Hara on to writing opera.