Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön
"Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön" ("This image is enchantingly lovely") is an aria from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1791 opera The Magic Flute.
The words of "Dies Bildnis" were written by Emanuel Schikaneder, a leading man of the theater in Vienna in Mozart's time, who wrote the libretto of the opera as well as running the troupe that premiered it and playing the role of Papageno.
Ich fühl' es, wie dies Götterbild, mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt.
Ich würde sie voll Entzücken", is not a well-formed iambic tetrameter line, and perhaps reflects a textual change by Mozart, who places a dramatic full-measure pause after Tamino's self-directed question.
David Freedberg offers an appreciation of Schikaneder's text; it "describes in extraordinary detail something of the mental movements that one can imagine accompanying the revelation of the picture.
Both Branscombe and Kalkavage have suggested that Mozart's arrangement of keys embodies a variety of sonata form, with the standard elements of exposition, development, and recapitulation.
There is a solo for the clarinets between the first and second quatrains, and the first violins play a thirty-second note motif, evoking Tamino's surging emotions, in the third section.
Branscombe suggests instead that Mozart tailored the music (his normal practice) to the singer who premiered it, his friend the composer/tenor Benedikt Schack, specifically setting the key so that the conspicuous high note to which the first syllable of "Bildnis" is sung would be Schack's high G: "For Tamino's glorious outburst at the opening of the Bildnis aria his top note had to be G – and that automatically made for an aria in E flat.
[10] Neangir, a young man sent to Constantinople to seek his fortune, is taken into the home of a friendly stranger, who plies him with a magic elixir and shows him a picture of his beautiful lost daughter Argentine.
Branscombe suggests Schikaneder borrowed several words from the "Neangir" text: "Bildnis", "Herz", "Regung", "Feuer" (in the sense of burning emotions), "Liebe", and "Entzücken".
The resemblance is hardly likely to be accidental, since Mozart himself contributed music to the same opera, which was in the repertory of Schikaneder's company prior to The Magic Flute.
Moreover, Tamino does not experience love as a state of turmoil in which all his senses are assaulted, as is the case with Count Almaviva, for example, but nor is it a magic force that paralyses all his energies, as it does with Don Ottavio.
These and similar melodic remembrances are not to be regarded as leitmotifs in the Wagnerian sense but as partly unconscious echoes of musical ideas that were in Mozart's mind throughout the composition of the opera.
Spike Hughes writes, "That rapt opening phrase does not occur again in this aria, and so has a remarkable effect of expressing that unforgettable but unrepeatable moment of love at first sight.
