Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781501391194

Table of Contents

Reviews

Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020 shows how musicological lucidity and theatrical imagination can fruitfully go hand in hand. Bellini’s three best-known operas, La Sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani, are re-interpreted in light of contemporary aesthetics. This book makes it clear that aesthetic practice can not only open up new paths toward an operatic work, but also take us deep into it, which means that it is capable of transforming it from the inside out. * Sergio Morabito, Opera Director and Head Dramaturg, Vienna State Opera * This innovative new book explores in compelling detail how the figure of Bellini has fared in our age of “remediation.” As the editors make clear, their ambition, powerfully realized, is to move beyond the usual confines of “opera reception”: to embrace a more fluid and challenging notion of how operatic works from the past might find new meanings in the ever-changing visual environments of the last century. * Roger Parker, Professor of Music, Emeritus, King’s College London, UK *

Author Information

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, where she is director of the Centre for Bellini Studies. 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. His publications include the monographs Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (2005) and Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (2019), and several edited volumes, such as The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004) and Giacomo Puccini and His World (2016, with Arman Schwartz). Between 2003 and 2008 he was co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available