I’ve told this story so many times, I thought surely I had shared it here before. Maybe I have. But it’s not turning up in a search of my old posts, so please forgive me if I’m repeating myself.

Today is the 350th anniversary of the birth of Tomaso Albinoni.

Albinoni is one of those Italian Baroque composers (Venetian, to be exact) who wrote so much agreeable, fairly interchangeable music. Perfect for morning or afternoon drivetime. For the most part, his works are short – ten minutes at average, as an educated guess. Those in a major key are bright, those in a minor key don’t dig too deeply. Oboe concertos. Concertos for strings. Thanks to Albinoni, the term “concerto a cinque” is heard fairly commonly on classical music radio stations.

In his lifetime, his works were viewed as being on a par with those of Arcangelo Corelli and Vivaldi. Bach also found his music of interest, basing at least two of his fugues on Albinoni themes and using the composer’s basslines for instructional purposes. It is this matter of the bassline that has secured Albinoni’s immortality in the hearts of music-lovers everywhere.

During World War II, a significant portion of Albinoni’s output was lost in the bombing of Dresden. (Which makes me wonder, how much did this guy actually write, anyway?) Then in 1958, seemingly out of nowhere, a musicologist by the name of Remo Giazotto (1910-1998) published a previously-unknown “Adagio in G minor.” This he claimed to have reconstructed from surviving fragments – a bassline and the wisp of a violin melody – from an Albinoni manuscript that had been housed in the Dresden State Library.

Sad and soulful, perhaps even desolate – wholly of a piece, in fact, with the tale of its recovery from the ruins of a city that had been leveled in a three-day Allied attack – it has become Albinoni’s most-frequently performed work. It’s been used in countless movies and television shows – “Gallipoli” comes to mind – and it is included in just about any collection of greatest hits of the Baroque.

The thing is, did Albinoni really write it?

Curiously, for whatever reason, Giazotto never produced the actual manuscript from which he claimed to have reassembled the work. This has led to a widespread belief that the piece is not by Albinoni at all, but Giazotto’s own creation. But if that’s indeed the case, why not own it? It’s beautiful music, man!

Perhaps he was afraid of being laughed out of academia. “Respectable” music at this point in time was teetering into the avant-garde. At the very least, it wasn’t tonal.

Interestingly, following Giazotto’s death, one of his assistants, Muska Mangano, did find the “Albinoni” fragments among his papers. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, there was a stamp corroborating that the source material had indeed once been stored in Dresden. However, the fragments had been transcribed in a modern hand. It’s assumed that this was the source from which Giazotto worked.

The original Albinoni manuscript has yet to be recovered. Clearly, there is still a fair amount of mystery surrounding the true provenance of this timeless, haunting classic.

So once more, an assessment of Albinoni manages to focus very little on the merits of his own achievements! Nothing about the cantatas. Nothing about the operas, which nobody knows.

Still, if people are still talking about him 270 years after his death, he must have done something right.

Happy birthday, Tomaso Albinoni!

The Albinoni Adagio

A whole mess of Albinoni “concerti a cinque” performed by I Musici

An aria from one of his operas

Trailer for Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli”