Recently discovered video footage shows that Evie Clair was trained in Italian opera. Even at 10 years old, she had no problem keeping up on this difficult duet with soaring agility and beauty. Before Evie Clair took the stage on America’s Got Talent in 2017, her classically-trained mom was the music teacher at her elementary school. They sing together live for the school talent show an operatic duet called Sull’aria from Motzart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
“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 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.” The song’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.
