"Sull'aria...che soave zeffiretto" (lit. "On the breeze...What a gentle little Zephyr) is a duettino, or a short duet, from act 3 of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492, to a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. In the duettino, Countess Almaviva (a soprano) dictates to Susanna (also a soprano) the invitation to a tryst addressed to the countess' husband in a plot to expose his infidelity.
Contents
Music
The duet is scored for oboe, bassoon, and strings. Its time signature is 6/8, its key is B-flat major, and it is 62 bars long; the tempo indication is allegretto. During the first part of the duet (bars 1–37), the Contessa dictates the title and the three lines of the letter and, after a pause, Susanna repeats the lines as she writes them. In the second part, the Contessa and Susanna read alternate lines with a slight overlap (bars 38–45) until they finish in a true duet with their conclusion. The duet has a vocal range from F4 to B♭5 for Susanna and from D4 to G5 for the Contessa.
Libretto
The full dialogue is:
In popular culture
In the film The Shawshank Redemption, prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) defies Warden Sam Norton (Bob Gunton) by playing the duettino over the prison's loudspeakers. Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) remarks in his voice-over narration: "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." This is ironic as the opera characters are singing about a duplicitous love letter to expose infidelity, and Dufresne's wife's affair is the event which indirectly leads to his imprisonment.
The duettino's appearance in the Shawshank Redemption soundtrack earned it a nomination as one of 400 songs in consideration for American Film Institute's list of 100 top movie songs, although it did not win a place on the list.
The piece also appears on the soundtrack of Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There and is also featured in I Love You Phillip Morris.