The Strange Case of Albinoni's Adagio

[Le Chiffre]

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The Strange Case of Albinoni's Adagio

The musical piece commonly known as "Albinoni's Adagio in G minor" is among the most popular and admired classical works of the 20th century. It is also often ranked among the greatest Adagios in music history. It has been used in many films; so many in fact that New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane called on a boycott of its use in films. "Should Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor not be banned onscreen?" he asks. "Any piece of music that has been used for Rollerball, Gallipoli, and Flashdance has, by definition, been squeezed dry."

Orson Welles was among the first to use it in a film, his 1962 production of THE TRIAL, based on the Franz Kafka novel and released four years after the Adagio was first published in 1958. Welles commented on how far ahead of its time it was for an early 18th century Baroque-era piece. It had qualities that made it sound more like something from the late 19th century Romantic era instead, an amazing piece of musical prophecy. Like Lane, Welles also lamented its overuse in subsequent films.

But Albinoni's Adagio also has another peculiarly Wellesian quality: it is now considered by many scholars to be one of the greatest hoaxes in music history. When it was first published in 1958, it was also copyrighted by a music critic and author named Remo Giazotto, who claimed to have fleshed out and completed the piece from a page fragment of what was believed to be a chamber work by Tomaso Albinoni, an all-but-forgotten Venetian composer who lived around the time of Bach and Handel. Giazotto had completed a biography of Albinoni in early 1945, just before the Allied bombing of Dresden, a key cultural city in Germany known for the beauty of its Baroque architecture. The page fragment, found in the rubble of a destroyed music library that had housed many music scores by Albinoni and other composers, was given to Giazotto by the library, or so he claimed.

Although the piece was not copyrighted until 1958, it had been completed in the late 1940s and had been performed, without Giazotto's consent, as early as 1950. The piece caused an immediate sensation wherever it was played throughout Europe, and seemed to touch a nerve and evoke, better than any other music, the feeling of the recent war's horrors, and the profound sense of grief and shock over the death of millions as well as the destruction of a pre-atomic Europe, perhaps the greatest civilization ever known. Peter Conrad, in his book, "Orson Welles, The Stories of his Life", said the piece gives the feeling of being transported from one world to another.

Welles himself said that the events of WWII are what mainly distinguish his film from Kafka's novel and he and Jean Ledrut's use of the Adagio seemed to capture a bridge between mourning the loss of a pre-industrial past and the dread of an intolerant and uncertain nuclear future. That is why Giazotto's story about the "Albinoni page fragment" having been found in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing (which by itself killed 20,000 people and caused severe criticism of the US and the other Allies) seemed to have a truthful ring to it for so many, and why Giazotto sought to get a legal claim on the work's performance and use, despite the fact that, as an "Albinoni piece", it was considered public domain by many.

However, a few years before Giazotto's death in 1998, he declared publicly that the Albinoni page fragment had never existed and that he himself had created the whole piece from start to finish. This gave Giazotto indisputable rights to any royalties created by the work's performance or use in any kind of presentation, such as a film. A 1999 study declared Giazotto to be the highest paid classical composer of the second half of the twentieth century, even though he never wrote any music, or at least none of any significance, other than the Adagio.

One would think that, having written such an extraordinary work by himself, there would be a clamoring to perform Giazotto's other pieces. There was none, and if there were any performances of his other works, or if those works even existed, there is little to no information about them. Many music scholars nowadays chalk up his writing of the Adagio as a kind of beginner's luck, but some question whether Giazotto could possibly have written such a work at all. He was an author, not a composer; a writer of words not music. Still others point to the Adagio's overuse in films and use that as an excuse to dismiss the work as a piece of glorified pop music.

But it remains a great work for many, and its strange history gives rise to an interesting question: if Albinoni did not write the Adagio, and Giazotto did not write it, then who did write it? Chances are, we'll never know for sure, although Giazotto is the one who at least commissioned it and his estate collects the money for it until 2068. In the Chartres scene from F For Fake, Welles says, "Maybe a man's name doesn't mean that much." That may be true when it comes to art, but not when it comes to the money produced by art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdRLM50sEUE&t=236s