introduction

Based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, DANTE is an electronic opera by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta.

The first electronic opera made by Pimenta knew its world première in 1984, at MASP Assis Chateaubriand Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, with libretto by Décio Pignatari and stage design by Fernando Zarif.

Entirely composed by Emanuel Pimenta, DANTE is a sixty minutes play. The opera has different outputs: the opera itself, a movie, a book and visual artworks.

DANTE was elaborated after a profound analysis of the original text of the Divine Comedy, taking as main reference the Italian edition La Divina Comedia, Mondadori, 1985, 1991, commento a cura di Giuseppe Villaroel, revisione del commento di Guido Davico Bonino e Carla Poma, saggio di Eugenio Montale, as well as several other texts, critical essays and diverse translations in different languages.

DANTE required intense research which took more than five years to acomplish, between 2003 and 2008.

Strongly based on Dante Alighieri's masterwork, the opera - as well as the movie - is structured on three movements - hell, purgatory and paradise - and the integral piece is composed by sixty sectors of one minute each. Each minute is a circle of Dante's travel in the afterlife. The last set of Cantos of Dante Alighieri's magnificent work was intentionally condensed. Thus, hell has twenty sections, or twenty minutes; purgatory, nine sections; and paradise thirty-one sections.

In this opera there are no judgments of value. All structural elements of hell, purgatory and paradise are constructed after the two fundamental laws of thermodynamics: aggregation and desegregation.

All singers and actors in this opera are real personages, but already died, virtual ones.

Except for some moments with the appearance of Caruso or Maria Callas, for example, the singing part is made up of voices of historical personages creating a new kind of sprechgesang.

DANTE is a continuous exercise of discovery.

Its musical structure is based on several micro compositions that form a complex network of multiple and unexpected relations.

Like what happens in Dante Alighieri's work, the opera is about a magical trip to afterlife world. A phantom world that paradoxically is present in our daily life, in our memories. DANTE's afterlife world is made by voices and images of important personages and of historical moments disembodied through the most diverse media.

In a parallel line, Dante's magical trip - in great part guided by the poet Virgil - is manifested as a face in continuous transformation, through dead and alive. A single face that incorporates Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sagan, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, William Anastasi, Alice Verostko, Arthur Loeb, Igor Stravinsky, Dove Bradshaw, Leni Riefesntahl, Oscar Wilde, Frida Kahlo, Gandhi, Helena Blavatsky, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King, Max Weber and Ravi Shankar among many others (see libretto)

About a thousand scenes, selected after a long research on historical films and great movie classics - always where people and actors are no longer alive - were the raw matter for the opera, through a complex score elaborated inside virtual environments. DANTE's virtual score guided the musical composition, the structuring of the movie as well as of all other parts of the opera.

Thus, DANTE is a trip to the afterlife world, in real terms, with the musical participation of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Claudio Arrau, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Arturo Michelangelo Bennedetti, Jacha Heifetz, John Cage, Tohru Takemitsu, Luciano Berio, Raymond Scott, David Tudor, Hans Joachim Koellreutter, Olivier Messiaen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Paul Hindemith, George Antheil, Arthur Schnabel, Michael Pugliese, Otto Luening, Charlie Parker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley, Eric Dolphy, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, Les McCann, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, Bennie Goodman, Enrico Caruso, Maria Callas, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix.

There are also Allen Ginsberg, Marcel Duchamp, Jack Kerouak, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Glauber Rocha, Grace Kelly, Giuletta Massina, Amedeo Nazari, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Caan, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Maximilian Schell, Montgomerry Clift, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, James Garner, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune, Françoise Hardy, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, John Frankenheimer, Clark Gable, Robert Wise, Georges Méliès, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Peter Sellers and many more.

The libretto was created as a parallel trip, a counterpoint to the entire work. In certain way, however part of a whole, music, movie, libretto, book and artworks are independent.

DANTE is a personal experience, different for each one, a trip of each person into the afterlife world, into his or her own memories and life, into the magical universe of Dante Aliguieri's Divine Comedy.

Dante Alighieri lived in France, during two years, having arrived in Paris exactly seven hundred years ago, in 1308.