Dust off your cravat as Declan Zapala has prepared a charming arrangement of the classic scene from Mozart’s opera masterpiece, as heard in The Shawshank Redemption.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is easily one of the most recognisable names in the history of Western music, and for good reason. Mozart was as prodigious as they come, writing his first piece of music (Menuet No.1 in G Major) at the ripe old age of five. In his short 35-year life Mozart composed a vast body of repertoire spanning well over 800 works for a multitude of settings. Mozart had a knack for beginning his music with extremely catchy passages and so is widely known for many of his recognisable symphonies, operas, concertos, sonatas, and serenades, though this barely scratches the surface of his oeuvre. There are almost too many renowned pieces to list, but some famous ‘go-to’ examples of Mozart’s music include his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, his Sonata No.11 in A Major (from which issue GT356’s excerpt from Rondo Alla Turca originates), his Symphony No.40 in G Minor, and his opera The Magic Flute with its iconic Queen Of The Night Aria.
The music prepared this month is an arrangement of the ‘Duettino’ (sometimes called the Letter Duet) from Act 3 of Mozart’s opera The Marriage Of Figaro; a scene in which the countess dictates to her maid what to write in a letter to her husband in a plot to expose his infidelity. The maid reading back lines at different points throughout the conversation is what gives the duet in this scene a loose ‘call and response’ texture.
Many will recognise it from the film The Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne hijacks a record player and blasts Mozart’s Marriage Of Figaro over the prison’s Tannoy system. Morgan Freeman’s character Red famously quips “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about… 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.” Unfortunately for Red, what thematically connects this music to the film is the subject of infidelity (Dufresne’s wife’s infidelity is what contributes to his incarceration), so don’t anybody tell him!
The orig
