ABSTRACT
In 1963 the ORTF (French Radio) commissioned the composer Luciano Berio and the poet Edoardo Sanguineti to write a work celebrating the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth. The concept of 'beginnings', 'middles', and 'ends' is used to frame the work as a who Against the kaleidoscopic visions of 'sin' presented, Sanguineti pits the opposite and simple concept of 'godliness'. Like much of the literature produced by the Neo-Avantgarde, Laborintus II condemns the new capitalist values of 1960s' Italy, and Sanguineti uses Dante and Dante's critique of usury in the Inferno as the focal point of the libretto. In order, more easily, to guide the reader through the maze of sources and their ramifications and relationships to each other, this chapter divides the libretto of Laborintus II into fourteen small parts, although it goes without saying that these divisions are nowhere to be found in the work itself.
