Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte
Mozart wrote the piece on 26 May 1787,[N 2] when he had just started to write Don Giovanni, in the Vienna district of Landstraße in the room of his friend and occasional composer Gottfried von Jacquin (1767–1792), who was then 21 years old.
Sybille Dahms believes this to be the contralto singer Katharina von Altomonte who sang – alongside Mozart's sister-in-law and former love interest Maria Aloysia Lange, the "incomparable" (Joseph II) tenor Valentin Adamberger, and the bass Ignaz Saal – in the March 1789 performance of Handel's Messiah in Mozart's orchestration.
On 27 March 1799 Constanze Mozart wrote to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel: In considering the above songs I must state for your and the public's benefit that the two: "Erzeugt von heisser Phantasie" [K520] and "Wo bist du, bild etc" [K530] did pass here, and thus most likely also in other places, for the work of the here deceased Emil Gotfried Edler v. Jacquin, a close friend of my husband.
It remained in the Spencer family until it was put up for sale on 16 October 1985 as lot 146 at Christie's, London, when a Janez Mercun in Geneva acquired it.
[3] Though famous in her time as "the German Sappho" and praised by Goethe, not much of Gabriele von Baumberg's work is notable today, but Franz Schubert set six of her poems[N 3] to music.
Mozart found the poem in the Wiener Musenalmanch auf das Jahr 1786 (Vienna Almanc of the Muses for the Year 1786).
Erzeugt von heißer Phantasie, In einer schwärmerischen Stunde Zur Welt gebrachte, geht zu Grunde, Ihr Kinder der Melancholie!
The arpeggiating rolls in the left hand in bars 6 to 9 illustrate both the burning flames and the singer's fury about the unfaithful lover.
The rising thirty-second notes to "Ihr brennet nun, und bald, ihr Lieben, ist keine Spur von euch mehr hier" (bars 12 to 14) return to the image of licking, rising flames and sparks, before again chromatically falling into doubt about the act just committed and the singer's lingering feelings towards the unfaithful lover.
The musical language in bars 12 to 14 often occurs in Mozart's operas to heighten emotional effect; we find a recitativo-like voice rising over the progression minor dominant→major dominant→3rd inversion of the seventh chord→diminished seventh→major dominant in La finta giardiniera (no.
A further change was the ending, which was originally a simple tonic chord on the last syllable of the vocal line; Mozart crossed out the closing double bar-line emphatically with eight marks and added the little piano postlude which rounds the piece off by echoing the opening figure.
