Introduction: Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2024

The introduction presents the volume _Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935–2020_. which 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 Abramović’s ‘opera project’ 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, whose final scene is accompanied by Bellini’s famous aria ‘Casta Diva’, was premiered. 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.