Edoardo Sanguineti's Laborintus II as a Dantean Palimpsest

Chapter one, “Edoardo Sanguineti’s Laborintus II as a Dantean Palimpsest”, by Luca Fiorentini and Eleonora Lima, proposes an analysis of the 1965 musical theatre composition Laborintus II, for which the composer Luciano Berio wrote the music, and the poet Edoardo Sanguineti the libretto. Laborintus II was commissioned by the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. Laborintus II has been defined by Vivienne Hand a “Neo-avantgarde celebration of Dante” (1998) as its peculiar way of engaging with the work of the Medieval poet is a testament to Sanguineti’s and Berio’s long-standing predilection for blurring the lines between tradition and experimentation. In order to understand how Sanguineti remediated Dante through the Neo-Avantgarde, and the Neo-Avantgarde through Dante, this chapter considers two main questions: which Dante Sanguineti brought on stage, meaning which interpretation of his work did he propose in Laborintus II; and, consequently, why Dante, meaning why Sanguineti in Laborintus II made use of Dante’s work to further clarify his own poetics and the one of the Neo-Avantgarde group. This chapter brings together Fiorentini’s and Lima’s broad range of expertise – from Dantean philology and Mediaeval literature, to contemporary literature and intermedial studies – and offers a rich scholarly analysis of Laborintus II as a Dantean palimpsest.