#SongLyricSunday September 6

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This week our host Jim Adams for Song Lyric Sunday has given us the prompt of Musical/Opera.

Here are the “rules”:
• Post the lyrics to the song of your choice, whether it contains the prompt words or not.  If it does not meet the criteria, then please explain why you chose this song.
• Please try to include the songwriter(s) – it’s a good idea to give credit where credit is due.
• Make sure you also credit the singer/band and if you desire you can provide a link to where you found the lyrics.
• Link to the YouTube video, or pull it into your post so others can listen to the song.
• Ping back to this post or place your link in the comments section below.
• Read at least one other person’s blog, so we can all share new and fantastic music and create amazing new blogging friends in the process.
• Feel free to suggest future prompts.
• Have fun and enjoy the music.

I have to admit that both genre Jim has prompted us this week are a stretch for me. I kept wracking my brain for a musical or opera that I had a great degree of comfort writing about. Like a lot of writers I had a moment where nothing came to me. Then for whatever reason the opera scene from the movie The Shawshank Redemption popped into my head.

I had no idea of what song title was but I do remember Ellis “Red” Redding played by Morgan Freeman having the following quote.

“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t wanna know. Some things are best left unsaid. 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 like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” 

Well it turns out that Andy played a snippet of “Duettino- Sull’aria” aria duet from one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s most popular operas “The Marriage of Figaro”. This song shows up in Act 3 Scene X

Here are the lyrics in Italian of course.

Here are the Lyrics translated to English so if any of you are like Red and me you now know what those two ladies were singing about.

Here is the complete YouTube Video of the Sull’aria with Rachel Willis-Sørensen and Christiane Karg singing the Countess and Susanna’ parts.

“Get busy living or get busy dying” whether it is listening to a Musical or an Opera.