Composed in 1974 and revised in 1975, the work is partly a setting of words by the Italian avant-garde poet Edoardo Sanguineti. Berio elaborates Sanguineti's work with extracts from and allusions to a host of other texts, including various translations of The Bible (St. John's Gospel), works by Dante (The Divine Comedy), Goethe (Faust), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto), T.S. Eliot ("East Coker" from Four Quartets), James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Roland Barthes (an essay on Georges Bataille) and also correspondence between Sanguineti and the composer. The title of the piece is an extension of the term "from A to Z": in the old Italian alphabet the three signs ette, conne, ronne came after z.
| Librettist | Edoardo Sanguineti (The work is partly a setting of words by the Italian avant-garde poet Edoardo Sanguineti. Berio elaborates Sanguineti's work with extracts from and allusions to a host of other texts, including various translations of The Bible (St. John's Gospel), works by Dante (The Divine Comedy), Goethe (Faust), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto), T.S. Eliot ("East Coker" from Four Quartets), James Joyce (Finnegan's Wake), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Roland Barthes (an essay on Georges Bataille) and also correspondence between Sanguineti and the composer.) |
| Date of composition | 1974 (revised in 1975) |
| Premiered | 1974, June 30th in Hilversum, Netherlands |
| Approx. duration | 32 minutes |
| Instruments | 5x Actor |
| Autotranslations beta |
Luciano Berio: A-ronne Luciano Berio: A-ronne Luciano Berio: A-ronne |