I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about and the truth is that I do not want to know, some things are better not to say. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if a beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.
These words belong to the voice-over of actor Morgan Freeman in this stupendous scene from the 1994 film, Shawshank Redemption, based on a story by Stephen King. The character recalls the magical moment that hearing the voices of those "two Italian women" meant for the inmates of Shawshank's fictional prison, after the protagonist (Tim Robinson) decides to send from the marshal's office towards the prison's courtyards that melody that could take you so high and so far away.
Mozart - The Marriage of Figaro
The music capable of performing this feat in a prison for condemned to life sentences is the duettino Canzoneta sull'aria, from act III of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera The Marriage of Figaro, completed on April 29, 1786, and released only two days after, at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
The libretto is based on Le marriage de Figaro, by Beaumarchais, which was not performed in Vienna by a clear ban from Joseph II due to its criticism of the society of those days. Therefore, the opening of the opera in Vienna was preceded by bad omens, which Leopold Mozart helped to feed by ensuring that Antonio Salieri and "his" had Mozart as the target of all their intrigues and would not hesitate in moving heaven and earth so that the premiére will result in a fiasco.
But Leopold was wrong in his predictions. Le Nozze di Figaro was released to an overwhelming success since the very day of its premiére. Soon it became famous and before long it was performed in much of Europe. Two centuries later, one of its arias serves as a backdrop for a brief moment of redemption.
In the following rendition of Duettino, the "two Italian women" who sing are Cecilia Bartoli and Renée Fleming.
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