Her repertoire included Mozart's Pamina, Susanna, Cherubino, Dorabella and Zerlina; Mimì in Puccini's La bohème; Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev's War and Peace; Tatiana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin; Marzelline in Beethoven's Fidelio; Mélisande in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande; Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites; the title roles in Janáček's Káťa Kabanová, Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen; the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier; Princess Eboli in Verdi's Don Carlos; Pat Nixon in Adams' Nixon in China; Wagner's Sieglinde and Venus; Salome in Massenet's Hérodiade; and Monteverdi's Poppea.
At school she took music only to escape geography, which she hated,[2] but her real interest was to make a difference in other people's lives in roles such as social worker or counsellor.
[4] Under Sir Mark Elder and the English National Opera, which she joined in 1978, she sang Lauretta in Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, Pamina in The Magic Flute, where her bell-like purity of tone and her intelligent phrasing came in for special critical approval,[4] and Mimi in Puccini's La bohème, which also attracted superlative reviews.
[5] With ENO, Eilene Hannan recorded the female title role in an English-language production of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in 1981 (available on DVD).
[4] She returned to Australia in the late 1980s, and worked in Neil Armfield productions, most notably as the Governess in Britten's The Turn of the Screw (for which she won a Green Room Award)[8] and in the title role of Janáček's Káťa Kabanová.
[5] Growing dissatisfied with the life of a singer, she trained and worked as a counsellor, an interest she had long held,[3] but she later rediscovered her passion for singing and carried on a dual career.
[13] In the later part of her working life Hannan was a noted English and French language dialect coach, and conducted master classes for the Dame Nellie Melba Opera Trust.
[14] Her father George Hannan was a member of the Australian Senate for Victoria 1956-65 and again 1970-74, mostly representing the Liberal Party but in his final years as an independent.