Vagabond Opera…
…a unique ensemble, plays Eastern-European, klezmer-based original, jazz and belly dance music with skill, exuberance, and a gritty vagabond edge. Eric Stern, operatic tenor, accordionist, pianist, and composer leads the band as they play songs about thieves, Jewish weddings, Parisian tramps and the enigmatic Marlene Dietrich. Every show is a cabaret of rich musical phrasing, sparkling lyrics and indomitable stage presence.
"Back at the turn of the century, poor Italian immigrants flocked to the opera," says Stern. "The classical tradition is totally valid, I think, but not when it becomes a class thing. One reason the band is called Vagabond Opera is that we’re trying to create an operatic atmosphere that’s for everyone." Glide’s Julie van Amerongen had a chance to speak with Stern about his inspiring collaborative.
Vagabond Opera mines many varied musical and theatrical traditions. Who are your personal inspirations from the genres you explore?
Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Ivo Papazov, Giacomo Puccini, Cole Porter – he and I share a birthday albeit seventy years apart, Gertrude Stein, Jussi Bjorling, Ulm Kulthoum, The Klezmer Conservatory band, and in particular Judy Bresller, Leonard Bernstein, Francis Poulenc, David Rosenbaum, Viola Spolin and Sigmund Romberg.
You seem to be riding a wave of musical groups married to theatrics in their performances. To what do you attribute the rising popularity of this phenomenon?
I have no idea. I’m not even sure it is a phenomenon as such. It would be nice if it were, but I think it’s too early to tell. There is also a difference between "theatrics" and actually integrating theater into performance, which is something we strive to do. For myself I can say that when I started the ensemble I wanted to carry something over from the operatic world…that is, I wanted to invoke a ritual space through a highly specialized art form, singing, specifically operatic singing, and bring with that art form some of the tools of opera. Not so much the mammoth sets and costumes, and definitely not the byzantine and bizarre hierarchies and forms of behavior that have grown up around opera as it has become an institution, but the sense of heightened drama, and the fact that the music never stops in an opera, so that tension builds and is released in an ever widening arc – in the best case scenarios, and you walk away feeling that you have been part of some ancient paean to the elements, and heavenly and chthonic forces. At the same time, I’m heavily influenced by actors and directors I’ve worked with in theater…not opera, and not even plays with lines as such, but improv-based, bare stage theater. You know you can put on a Shakespeare play with actors, two chairs and a knife, and if the players are doing their job you’ll see Banquo’s disembodied head, the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands, and the army of trees, without any special effects. So THAT consciousness, married to the operatic one, has made Vagabond Opera, opera stripped down to its essentials.
Back to your question of a larger context, the other, perhaps somewhat obvious point, about musical theater and opera, is that they require skill to be effective. Because of my family’s radical background, I found myself in the position of having studied these various arts for years – singing the most, and then finding fault and abandoning the institutions to which they were attached. I’m sure others feel the same way; certainly they do in my ensemble. Why study opera for years and then have to deal with the stuffy bureaucracy, the administrative stuff, working with directors who are bereft of vision and talent and are there for a host of other reasons having nothing to do with their merit…the list goes and at this point I’m not bitter or vituperative. But at one point I was, and instead of hanging around that world being negative I wanted to do something positive, find like-minded comrades and create my own world or continue the world that I saw being created by Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Britten, the composers, not the directors. Ten years ago when I was heavily ensconced in the operatic world, this was THE debate, even though the debate was effectively moot: How had we come to a place where the director was king, instead of the composer?. And to then plunge myself into the world of bands, seemed like some step backwards, but for me it provided a great freedom, the field was wide-open.
You know I think popular music has gotten itself into trouble. There USED to be theatrics, look at Little Richard, look at The Who composing a rock-opera. Then you had people going inward, locking themselves into the studio as if they were Glenn Gould, and out came these sometimes very beautiful pieces of art – of course the danger with albums is always to over-produce, but more and more – think Brian Wilson, bands were retreating from doing anything interesting onstage. I’m generalizing here, of course. And then you had a backlash against all that heady stuff–punk rock, with three chords, and three chords only and everyone dressing like the working class, whether they were of it or not, and most importantly, really connecting with audiences. So you’d have bands with the energy and the connection but without the musical skill, necessarily. Or bands that had skilled people, or at least skilled engineers who could write out string quartets and fanfares as an aural backdrop in studio, but who were becoming disconnected from the audiences. I think in some ways, the majority of so-called popular music being performed in venues today has the worst of both worlds. Unskilled players, who like their punkish predecessors, dress down, but only because they are lazy, not because they are trying to connect with any class constituency, and with no thought that one might have some responsibility to connect with the audience or lead them from point A to point B. So IF people are moving away from that, that’s a grand thing. I’m sick of a stage with two guitars a bass and drums, undecipherable vocals and band members who don’t speak one word to the audience. It’s not cool, it’s not progressive, it may have been a meta-alienating Brechtian technique thirty years ago, but now it’s just poor showmanship and rudeness. People are paying to see you, give them something for their money, and at the same time don’t pander to your audience. As I said, the field is wide-open in popular music.
* Eric’s parents ran an anarchist book and record shop in Philadelphia. His grandmother danced in the Yiddish theater.
On your self-titled CD, you sing songs in a number of languages. Do you speak those languages as well?
I get this question a lot, after shows. "Do you speak all of those languages?" The answer is no, but I know exactly what I’m saying in every song. I AM a polyglot and speak French, German, and some Spanish, and Italian. I studied Yiddish and Arabic for about a year each too. But with every song I take the approach I learned in opera. You get the text first and a dictionary and perhaps a grammar book. You learn what each word means and how to pronounce it so that you know exactly what you’re saying.
How does being based in Portland feed what you do?
I came to this town with practically nothing because when I turned thirty I decided to relinquish all of my possessions, except my accordion and a journal and clothes and travel the country looking for the next place to live. It was a romantic and STUPID idea; I don’t recommend it to anyone. As I say I came to this town with nothing, I was living out of my girlfriend’s car with her and my dog and I started playing on the street, right next to Powell’s books on Hawthorne and downtown as well. The people of Portland with their one dollar bills SAVED MY ASS. I was able to make money for a rental deposit in less than two weeks. So, in one sense being in Portland literally fed me, and then…and then to find such a loving, artistically diverse musical community, supportive and generous in so many ways. I can’t go on enough about this city, how it feeds me, the landscape, the variable sky, the cold black river…I’m from Philadelphia originally, it’s older and it’s a place where people are beaten down. Here they don’t seem that way, people have hope for art, music, alternative fuels and the health of the planet, the list goes… You know there’s a stereotype about artists locking themselves in a closet with a bottle of whiskey and then producing great work. I have to tell you that my best work has been here and I think the connection between that work and the locally-grown organic produce that I consume isn’t a casual one.
Why the obsession with Marlene Dietrich?
There is none, although everyone thinks there is. I’d say to people, remember what your teachers taught you in English class: don’t confuse the narrator of the poem with the author himself – unless, of course it’s Emily Dickinson! Herman Melville wasn’t obsessed with a whale named Moby Dick, Toni Morrison doesn’t believe in a ghost named Beloved, and I don’t have too much of a stake as to whether or not I am Marlene Dietrich. But I would like to clear something up…the song is less about Marlene and more about gender bending and ultimately re-creation! I always admired the way Marlene was wearing pants and men’s clothes back when women weren’t, and she’d go from black tails to the soft meandering outfit she wore in The Scarlett Empress. Her head emerges wrapped in white fur and that pours itself over lace, it’s stunning. So…um…even though I know minute details about the costumes she wore doesn’t mean I’m obsessed, right? Ultimately she was a woman who was able to re-create herself at least twice over, from her early career, then into the plucked eyebrow stage, then with Destry Rides Again, and finally in her later years entertaining all over the world with her stage show. Inventing and re-inventing yourself is what we do in this country, and I imagine she must have felt quite freed by that once she left Germany. So if there’s anything I get out of that song it’s this: there’s no way a 225 pound, hairy man like myself, is going to do much gender-bending. If I am anything I am not androgynous, but that song is always a moment – and this is the black magic of art, when I CAN transform myself, I can become Marlene.
What would you be doing if you weren’t doing Vagabond Opera?
I would go to an Arabic-speaking country with my partner and child and try to learn the language. It’s a damned difficult one to learn, and I am in love with it, but trying to learn it at the University wasn’t enough, I need to hear it spoken every day. Or maybe I’d just sit at home with my son Jascha…he’s 10 months old, and I HAD NO IDEA that having a baby was this wonderful and fun.
Any other comments you might like to add?
Even though I am the founder, front man, and artistic director of the ensemble it is a highly collaborative endeavor and I feel fortunate to work with the members of the group.
For more information, visit The Vagabond Opera website
