Sanguineti's poem is almost entirely built from extracts from and allusions to a wide range of 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.
[1] 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.
[2] Berio employs a wide range of vocalisations, from sung phrases borrowed from Dutch folksongs to direct speech at various pitches and wordless intonations and inflexions.
It was commissioned by Dutch Radio KRO as a tape composition for five voice actors, three male and two female.