“What attracts me so much about opera is the scale. The cinematic scale of everything, I find to be so energising.”
Hannah Hayden
Hannah Hayden is a LA-born, NJ-raised, London-based librettist, songwriter, and musician, making music under the moniker Platonica Erotica. Hannah moved to London to study literature and has continuously missed her flight back to America since due to probably being hungover. Described by Loud & Quiet as a “deceptively heavy gothic singer-songwriter”, her first single as Platonica Erotica — ‘Marriage of Convenience’ — released in 2021 on Slow Dance Records; since then, she has been performing in London’s music scene in venues such as The Windmill and Moth Club, and accompanied friends Black Country, New Road on tour. Hannah has recently made a pivot into opera, currently studying as a librettist on the MA Opera Making and Writing course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; her debut chamber opera The Casserole with composer Evan L. Snyder premieres on June 20-21 and 24-25 at Milton Court Studio Theatre, London.
Ahead of the premiere staging of The Casserole later this week, we caught up with Hannah at the Barbican to discuss her upcoming opera, constructing stories, the “action” of libretto, and operatic cinematography…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Hannah! Thanks for joining me at the Barbican today. I understand you grew up in New Jersey, before moving to London and “missing your flight back ever since” (as it says in your bio!). When you were growing up, did you immediately gravitate towards writing, or did you have other creative outlets?
Hannah Hayden: It’s definitely been a more winding journey, I guess. My parents were both in musical theatre, so I was always musically inclined, I always had it around. That world was very familiar to me. They did have very good taste, as well — I was always exposed to good music — and that was very much part of my ecosystem, taking all of that in.
I did ballet when I was younger. I was a devoted, religious ballerina. -laughs- I did that well into my adolescence. A lot of that was about internalising music, and I gained a language from that; definitely a discipline and an understanding of marking art. That was very important to me. Eventually I stopped, because I didn’t want to do it professionally — and I didn’t like the way that people spoke to you in the rehearsal room. I found it degrading, and I didn’t wanna continue with that.
During my teenage-hood times, I used to write a lot. I used to have little diaries, and I would write little poems and stories and whatnot. That’s always been quite a constant. I think when I stopped dancing, I was immediately like “I’m gonna be a writer” — I’m gonna be, like, Virginia Woolf or something. -laughs-
When you moved to London for uni, was that when you first started making music, as well?
When I was studying literature in London, I kind of became more involved with people who were in bands, and going out. I honestly ended up doing that because it was so much more fun than any literary reading. The community matched my energy at the time. It was more manic, and intense: “alright, we’re gonna go to the pub, then we’re gonna go to this DIY gig that we’re playing, and then we’re gonna go back to the afterparty and stay up till 5am on a Tuesday, and then we’re gonna go to class tomorrow…” -laughs- I just became more involved with that. I also did a lot of choral singing in high school, so I had a knowledge of music, but I hadn’t done it in a band setting before.
So I loved singing, and so I started my project — Platonica Erotica. I was doing the same thing, playing DIY shows — you know, The Windmill, George Tavern, Shacklewell Arms, Paper Dress, MOTH Club — all those venues that are in that circuit. I was lucky enough to go on tour a few times; my friends Black Country, New Road took me on tour. I’ve worked with some really great musicians in my band, as well. That project fluctuated between live, or guitar-driven / synth-driven, traditional “rock band” setups — but I would also do backing-track shows with tracks that I produced.
Slow Dance Records picked up a song that I made, which was the first song I ever produced… on a bootlegged version of Logic. -laughs- It does sound like someone who’s never produced anything — but it’s pretty boppy, and it’s fun. But other than that, I’m not great at beats. So it would usually be these soundscapey-type things; I have one song where there’s lots of choral harmonies — I love bringing back the choral music.
So what got you into writing, on a professional level? Were there any particular projects that excited you?
I was writing professionally because I went on tour, and I needed a job. I was working in an office before, and it was okay, but it wasn’t really my vibe; I was like “I need to do random crap, basically, so I can focus more on what I actually care about.” So I was doing lots of random crap — including ghostwriting. I was creating these narratives, all day, for other people. I enjoy writing lyrics, and I have all of that [through] my songwriting — [but] I was like “oh, I actually do like constructing novels and stories.” And then my friend and I ended up writing a pantomime! My friend Zac and I wrote a pantomime, that we performed at the George Tavern — and it was so much fun.
How did you then end up discovering opera, and the world of libretto?
I think something about my upbringing — with my parents having worked in theatre — and the state of seeing a lot of theatre now… I always lamented it. But then I thought: I have a background in these multiple facets of what music theatre is, with my music, dance, and writing experience. There’s a visual sensibility as well as the sonic one, and the literary one. So [I thought] maybe I could venture into something like music theatre, or opera. And then someone shared about this course [Guildhall Opera Makers] on Facebook, and I started reading about it, and I was like… -gasp- “That looks amazing!”
Let’s talk a bit about this pivot into opera and libretto — particularly with your indie pop background. Would you say your songs with Platonica Erotica had a particularly narrative sensibility to them?
It’s funny. I mean, a lot of the narrative themes I was looking at with Platonica Erotica… Songwriting didn’t click for me until I was so emotionally over-wrought that I felt like I had to shout about my feelings to an audience. It wasn’t like I was trying to describe anything in a constructive, or premeditated, academic way. It was this embodied, visceral thing. That’s [when] pop music just clicked for me. But my first thought was: okay, I’m telling something to an audience — there’s a direction here, there’s a relationship here. That’s the relationship I’m having in the context of this music.
A lot of my songs, at that time, were about heartbreak. You know, everyone loves a song about heartbreak — because everyone understands that feeling. And everyone understands rage — which is what a lot of my very early songs are about. That was the kind of emotional exchange that was happening. But I always wanted to think about it a little further. It started to become very claustrophobic, performing my own emotions over and over again on stage.
I think that when I started having this outlet of writing fiction — that wasn’t even purportedly my fiction, because it was for someone else — I found there was space to expand there. I liked the “assigned” nature of it, that it was very outside of myself. I thought I would like to be able to have narrative in song that really has nothing to do with me; obviously, it comes from me, but I’m not the centre of it, as it were.
Of course — like, you don’t have to put your own story on show.
You don’t have to flagellate yourself before everyone. That’s something I was trying to weather — and when I return to it more, when I’m not doing [opera]… I have still been songwriting, and nothing I’ve written is about love right now. It’s not about that intense, literally emo vibe… -laughs- I don’t know how else to describe it, yeah. I think that was driving me insane a bit, as well.
I think I felt like a clown. My job was being completely alone, writing fantasy novels — which were completely bizarre — and I didn’t really have any supervision on that. So I was doing that by myself, which was ridiculous. The only outside people I saw, as it were, were peers; and where I’d see the most people would be me going on stage, making this tiny opera of my inner emotional life. I just felt like a total clown after a while. So getting back into an academic context, in some way, was like “I’ve found oxygen again!”
For me, getting into composition almost felt like a huge breath of fresh air from the “band” thing: “hang on, you don’t have to make art like this, you can make art that doesn’t burn you out?”
Exactly! That’s been an amazing revelation this year: making art that doesn’t burn me out. In those types of scenes, whether you want to or not, I’ve worked with people I’ve known for seven years now — people I’ve had long friendships, maybe romantic run-ins with. The world seem[ed] so small; and right now, it doesn’t feel so small, it feels bigger. There’s life outside of the south London music scene. -laughs-
Let’s talk more about the work you’re doing now as an opera librettist. What kind of preconceptions did you have about opera before going into Opera Makers at Guildhall?
One thing I was reticent about was that sometimes I can find the classical voice to be alienating. I find it so incredibly specific; I find it difficult to listen to certain themes, I guess, in the classical context and not just think “performance”. Finding truth in that, I was a bit worried about.
You know, last week, I walked out of Lucia di Lammermoor [at the Royal Opera House] halfway. I thought it was boring as hell. I don’t like Verdi, and I don’t like Donizetti. Obviously, I love music theatre and opera; but I was worried about experiences like that, where I’m going to be thrust into a situation where that’s the standard — and I’m expected to connect to that? Because I don’t. But I do connect with some things.
I guess it’s the difference between connecting to the medium, and connecting to peoples’ (and companies’) specific interpretations of the medium.
Or specific periods, trends, and styles. But having that discernment is good. That’s one of the things I’ve felt so much freedom with as my twenties progress, as I get older. Maybe because I was in ballet school — I went to quite a strict, rigorous school — I think I grew up with a lot of ideas of “I don’t know everything, and I need to be taught, and I need to follow someone’s idea of it if I want to get it perfect.” That’s something that appears in a lot of classical traditions; but then actually getting out and making my own work — especially in a DIY context — and being like “you know what? Fuck it, I don’t care if anyone likes it, if everyone likes it.” It’s my time, it’s my money, it’s my taste.
So in terms of your practice as a writer and collaborator — what does resonate with you in the medium of opera?
What attracts me so much about opera is the scale. The cinematic scale of everything, I find to be so energising. But not only that; even the scale of the rehearsals, there’s so many different people there with different jobs.
In terms of what’s resonating with libretto writing: I’ve been really, really grateful for my composer, Evan L. Snyder. There’s certain things that he’s been able to articulate in the composition process after he receives the words, that have helped me tailor how to think about writing something for performance. You have to be so much more aware of action, basically. Although sometimes, I’ll go off on a more poetic journey — [but] it’s more about finding the balance; when there should be a certain amount of energy between characters, when it should zoom out a bit. Just incorporating action into the way I write, and that awareness, has been something I’ve been trying to take on.
One of the things I hated about Lucia di Lammermoor the other week was that everyone was describing what they were doing, as they were doing it — which is just incredibly poor writing. Like, “sometimes I sit by this well and weep” — and she’s sitting by the well and weeping… well, okay, what else is new? -laughs-
Of course — understanding the dramaturgy of the words, and synergising those.
When you’re studying literature, it’s so much about the “text” a lot of the time. Obviously, everything’s about “text” — but something I started thinking about when I was ghostwriting, and then more within [opera]: a lot of it is just so much character study, which is basically gossiping. Why did they do this, why would they do this, why would this person do something like that — I wonder what happened in their childhood? Like, that kind of stuff — that’s pretty much the basis for everything; you need to have the complexity.
That’s a really good place to bring up The Casserole — the opera you’ve been working on with Evan L. Snyder for the past year. How did you initially come up with the concept for the opera, and what did your first stages of collaboration with Evan look like?
I think we definitely clicked when we were talking in initial sessions, on Zoom — when he was still stuck in Michigan. When he came over, that was like “oh… you’re real.” -laughs- We had to come up with three ideas for chamber operas, to pitch to the [opera] department. We had two very serious ideas, and we thought it was definitely gonna be one of those; we did not think it would be this one. This was like, “oh, we just need another idea — why not?”
Initially, [The Casserole] was [a] stoner comedy about these two people who get duped into selling their souls for a casserole recipe. It has made a lot of plot changes since then. The casserole aspect of it remains the same, and it is [still] a comedy — not a stoner comedy. To be honest, it does lead in some ways into childrens’ territory, a little bit; I don’t think there’s anything keeping it from being a children’s opera, when I think about it. -laughs- There’s quite a few references to fairytales.
That’s quite an interesting observation — that our minds often go to “children’s media” when we think of fairytales.
The thing is, things like fairytales and mythology… I find that those come out of writing without one’s knowledge. I think that they’re just lodged in the subconscious. We have witches [in the opera], so that leads into Macbeth, Hansel and Gretel territory; but even when [I was] writing the pantomime with my friend, these references would just come out. And [you’d be] like “oh — where did that come from?”
What other kinds of references found their way into The Casserole?
We decided to set [The Casserole] in the States — in the Midwest. Evan’s from the Midwest — and on my father’s side, I have family in Minnesota, which is really Midwestern. I have a really obsessive online interest with white women in America who can’t cook; that obviously just bled in, because it’s about this disgusting casserole recipe that they’re trying to find.
It is very farcical. When we first got this one accepted, rather than the other sombre, serious operas, we were like “shit… this is gonna have to be funny.” So I remember I wrote a draft of it, which just wasn’t funny, at all. I wrote it in a rush, because I was like “I just have to get something to paper.” And then I just made the conscious decision in my head, [to be] like: the next one’s gonna be funny. And it was, I guess — I don’t know how that happened. -laughs-
When we think about “comedic operas”, we think about operettas, Donizetti, that sort of thing; but trying to be comedic without straying into that territory is quite a fine line. How have you managed navigating that with Evan?
We got together and we watched tons of things that we thought were funny. We watched Monty Python, Young Frankenstein, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure… Lots of stuff like that. We were sending memes that we thought were funny back and forth. One thing that I am proud of in this opera [is that] it’s not illicit. It’s not about sex at all. There’s definitely some black comedy in there — there’s witches, there’s good and evil — it’s not R-rated, as it were. I’m quite happy about that, because I quite like “wholesome” humour. I think it’s more difficult, having written things with a lot of illicit humour myself. If you want shock value, you can do that, but this is definitely not shock value. It’s a bit more gentle, which I quite enjoy.
In terms of the structure — were there any revelations within the libretto from Evan’s text-setting and composition?
There was definitely a lot that came out. Syllabically, and in terms of the nitty-gritty, definitely. That was more to do with action. But then also, on a larger scale, when the director — Ashley Dean — came in, there were certain changes that would add more clarity to what would happen onstage. Or alternately, give more space to interpretation, which could then give more options for what to do onstage.
Did you have any particular librettists, or particular inspirations, in mind while writing The Casserole?
No — other than Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim sometimes. Obviously, I know libretti through my parents; [they] were involved in a lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein productions when I was smaller. I had an awareness of that. I noticed it [text] was something that I listened for, when I listened to a lot of music — a lot of theatre music, specifically. It was something I had a lot of respect for, but I didn’t know the same constraints around it. I’d seen occasionally [that] poets would publish libretto as a poetry collection; and I assumed that libretto must also lean into other types of dramatic writing, like playwriting. But I didn’t know what a “professional librettist” would look like. -laughs- I’ve learned more of that. But it does seem to have that kind of flexibility. I don’t know how many people are out there only writing opera libretto — but at the same time, I don’t think I’d want to be doing only opera libretto. I like writing numerous things.
One other project that the librettists have done on this course I’ve really enjoyed is Voiceworks [ed. a series of art songs created in collaboration with Guildhall MMus composers]. That has taken such a different form to the operas, because even if there’s a narrative inclination within the song, it’s not part of a larger work. So we have these self-contained pieces that are very individual, very wacky and bizarre. One of mine came from a poem I had written — and so listening to a poem set to music, versus something I’d specifically written as lyrics, it’s really different. It’s really interesting what that brings up.
What did the collaborative relationship with the Voiceworks composers look like for you?
It’s in-depth at times. We’ve all agreed thematically on what we want, but also there isn’t as much to have a back-and-forth about. With Voiceworks, it’s a lot of these composers’ first time writing for the voice — whereas Evan predominantly writes for the voice, I’d say. There isn’t as much material to back-and-forth about; it’s not like these are “characters” I’d envisioned in any way, in the same way as they are with the opera.
Tell me about what’s next for you — what writing and musical projects are you most excited about following the premiere of The Casserole?
One of my next projects is [that] I’m writing a book for a musical. I’m whittling down where that musical starts and ends a little bit. I’m also interested in doing something that’s not completely in song — [with] speaking as well, basically. I’m definitely interested in doing more song cycles, I think. But [the] musical is the kind of things I’d be interested in working on next. I don’t know if I’d want to work on an opera without a composer, necessarily — by myself. I’d also like to compose, as well; I haven’t done any actual composition on this course, and there have been times in the composer workshops where I’ve been like “oh, I miss it!” I wanna be talking about this fucked chord in great detail, and how it functions… -laughs-
Do you see your experience in opera shaping how you write music for Platonica Erotica, as well?
Yeah — I think the way I write music for Platonica Erotica was definitely stemming from someone who had been raised with a lot of musical theatre, who had done a lot of choral singing, who had embodied it in that dancerly way; and less from someone who had been raised in DIY bands, and that kind of thing. Even though it presented the same way, there was an aspect of that definitely coming from those muscles.
But there’s always so many things I want to do. If I could do ten million things at once, I probably would. I’m scared I’m gonna want to get into film at some point. -laughs- But I think opera right now is a good stopping point, because it encompasses so much. And that’s why I find it so gratifying; it’s a place to put every thought.
I’d say opera is quite filmic, anyway — at least, in how we experience it, being in the twenty-first century and being used to cinema.
It is! I mean, the scale is cinematic. But I often find that I’m affected by a good piece of theatre in a way that I am not in film. Sometimes, I will walk away from a truly excellent piece of theatre in disbelief that it’s not real at all — or it is real, in a deeply personal way. -laughs- I think that the abstraction of [opera] really accesses much greater emotional truth. That’s what I appreciate about doing it.
Finally: what kinds of artistic projects are exciting you at the moment?
I recorded a bunch of songs last summer, that I will release at some point — when I can be galvanised to want to perform in front of people again. -laughs- [And] I’m writing a collection of poetry. I’m not writing about love, which is fantastic. There’s lots of animals; lots of Goodbye to All That kind of themes. That Joan Didion essay which haunts me — “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair” — it really is. That’s something that’s been on my mind.
But I’m just most excited about this right now — The Casserole. I’m very excited about everything being written under this guise, moving in new directions with writing.
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Hannah Hayden and Evan L. Snyder’s opera The Casserole premieres this Thursday-next Tuesday (June 20, 21, 24, 25), at Milton Court Studio Theatre, London – you can get tickets at:
Learn more about Hannah Hayden and Platonica Erotica:
References/Links:
- Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), production by the Royal Opera House (2024)
- Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That (1967)
