Composer of the Month
As the 350th anniversary of his birth draws near, the prolific but surprisingly obscure Venetian is explored by Kate Bolton-porciatti
Kate Bolton-porciatti on Albinoni’s considerable gifts
Albinoni is celebrated today for the brooding G minor Adagio for strings and organ that has underscored many a tearful moment in TV shows and films, from Butterflies to Rollerball, Flashdance to Gallipoli. Paradoxically, while many people still call it ‘Albinoni’s Adagio’, he himself would probably not have recognised it. The story is one of those curious enigmas when a composer’s most famous work turns out to be by someone else – just like Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary, which is now Jeremiah Clarke’s.
The history of Albinoni’s signature tune is full of surprising twists: once feted as a proto-romantic work by the Venetian Baroque composer, in the 1990s the piece was revealed to be a ‘forgery’ by Albinoni’s biographer Remo Giazotto. Giazotto claimed to have realised the Adagio from fragments of an Albinoni manuscript that had been pulverised in the Second World War. Slender evidence has been found to support his claim, so scholarly discussion still rages: is Giazotto’s work a ‘reconstruction’ or a hoax?
Curiously, it’s not the first time Albinoni has been impersonated. In the 1720s, an imposter toured Germany posing as him – and hastily fled when ‘the real Albinoni’ arrived in Munich to stage an opera. This may explain the scattering of spurious works published contemporaneously in Germany in the name of Tomaso Albinoni.
We suppose that ‘the real Albinoni’ is the subject of an anonymous portrait of a refined young composer, richly bewigged and fashionably dressed in a sumptuous scarlet jacket from which cascade white lace cuffs. This portrait (now in a private collection) confirms he was more of a gentleman amateur rather than a professional musician, a role that was seen as socially inferior; indeed, he signs his first publications ‘dilettante veneto’ – ‘a dilettante from the Veneto’. We know that he came from a well-to-do bourgeois family and as a young man he followed in his father’s footsteps as a master stationer and maker of playing cards.
At the age of 23, though, he graced the stage with his first opera: Zenobia, regina
Albinoni followed in his father’s footsteps as a master stationer and maker of playing cards
de’palmireni, a ‘heroic’ work glorifying the eponymous Queen of Palmyra. It may not be entirely by chance that Albinoni slipped easily from the profession of card maker to opera composer, for we might imagine Venetian opera houses as more like Las Vegas than La Scala: in their foyers and gaming rooms, the upper classes played cards and gambled (activities from which the theatres made much of their income), the opera boxes became betting dens, and contemporary sources frequently implore audiences to stop their fluttering during the performance. Zenobia was staged in 1694 during Carnival – the season strongly linked with gaming when, according to the diarist John Evelyn, ‘all the world repaire to Venice to see the folly and madnesse.’
The opera’s librettist, Antonio Marchi, praised ‘the accomplished and delightful music of Signor Tomaso Albinoni’,