Bellini on Stage and Screen

Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020 offers nine case studies of the history of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas on stage, on screen, and in sound, video and performance art. This investigation begins in 1935, the hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death and the year when his first biopic was released, and ends in 2020, when performance artist Marina Abramovic’s ’opera project’ 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, whose final scene is accompanied by Bellini’s famous aria ’Casta Diva, ’ was premiered.

In Part One, several recent productions of La sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani are discussed from different perspectives, but the common focus is on the possible meanings of these works for contemporary spectators. Part Two, centered on cinema, includes chapters on biopics of Bellini that make extensive use of his music, as well as on the presence of this music in soundtracks of films from the last half century. Part Three turns to other media or mixtures of stage and screen, and focuses on Bellini in sound and video art of the last few decades, on YouTube and its fandom, and on 7 Deaths of Maria Callas.

The volume offers an expansive view of the many ways in which Bellini’s operas have been visualized and conceptualized over the past century, and of what they may have meant, and may still mean, for twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

Emilio Sala is Associate Professor of musicology at the University of Milan, Italy. He is editor of the series Le Sfere and has published many books as author and editor, among them The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s ＂La traviata＂ (2013). Since 2020, together with Giorgio Biancorosso, he has been founding co-editor of the journal Sound Stage Screen.

Graziella Seminara is Associate Professor of musicology at the University of Catania, Italy. She is director of the Centre for Bellini Studies at the University of Catania. She is author of monographs on Jean-Philippe Rameau (2001) and Alban Berg (2012), and of the book Lo sguardo obliquo. Il teatro musicale di Corghi e Saramago (2015).

Emanuele Senici is Professor of musicology at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy. Among his publications are ＂La clemenza di Tito＂ di Mozart. I primi trent’anni (1791-1821) (1997), The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004), Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (2005), Giacomo Puccini and His World (2016, co-edited with Arman Schwartz) and Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (2019). Between 2003 and 2008 he was co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.