Adagio in G Minor

Adagio in G Minor, composition attributed to Tomaso Albinoni. Widely familiar through its frequent use in film scores, the work is slow of pace, solemn of mood, and frequently transcribed for various combinations of instruments. It often appears on recordings of various short Baroque classics, and the American rock band The Doors recorded a version in 1968.

Actually, this famed work is not by Albinoni at all. It is a mid-20th century creation by Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, who claimed to have found a fragment of an Albinoni composition in the archives of a bombed-out German library, the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in Dresden. That library did contain a trove of Albinoni’s compositions that were destroyed when the city was firebombed during World War II, so Giazotto’s claim was plausible. According to Giazotto, the fragment contained only the low-pitched supporting continuo part and a few phrases of the melody itself, a total of only six measures in all. From that meager beginning, Giazotto fleshed out a complete composition according to established Baroque principles of composition, creating something generally in the style of a chaconne, in which a set of repeated pitches underlies an evolving melody.

The new Adagio—supposedly only edited by Giazotto, though, in fact, nearly entirely (and perhaps even entirely) his own work, written in 1949—was published by the Italian publishing house Ricordi in 1958, nearly three hundred years after Albinoni’s birth. Although it is not, strictly speaking, an Albinoni composition, it does bear characteristics of the Italian Baroque style, particularly in its overall structure.

It is a gentle and ethereal work, one that has helped to bring Albinoni back to the musical mainstream; it also served to preserve the name of Giazotto for future generations. Some scholars point out that even Giazotto’s origin story for the Adagio may be a fiction, as no one other than he ever saw this supposed Albinoni fragment whence the few phrases originated. Giazotto died in 1998, carrying his secret to the grave, and the story of the Adagio in G Minor is likely to remain a mystery.