May 2022 - Writing and Language Test Q 1-11

Whose Adagio Is It Anyway?

As the story goes, it was 1948, and musicologist Remo Giazotto was about to 1 junk a stack of unneeded documents from his research on 2 Venetian composer, Tomaso Albinoni when a stray scrap of paper fell to the floor. On the Paper, Giazotto claimed, was a fragment of notated music 3 dating at the early 1700s and written by Albinoni himself Anxious to bring this lost piece of music back to life, Giazotto set to work on a creative reconstruction that he would eventually publish in 1958 under the title in G Minor for Strings and Organ on Two Thematic Ideas and on a Figured Bass by Tomaso Albinoni. The popularity of Albinoni's Adagio, as it would come to be known, would elevate the Venetian composer from relative obscurity and assign Albinoni s name to one of the most ubiquitous pieces of classical music of the last hundred years.

To reconstruct the piece, Giazotto needed to work 4 as both a composer and historian. He wrote new material where the fragment broke off while remaining faithfal to the Baroque style of Albinoni's time, which favored high contrasts, prominent string sections, and a unified mood throughout each piece. The mood Giazotto set for Alhinnni’s fragment is somber and pierced with yearning. The Adagio begins with the double bass (the Lowest of the stringed instruments) marking a brooding, dirge-like rhythm, whille the pipe organ 5 play a gentle introductory tune above it. When the rest of the ensemble—violins, volas, and 6 cellos—joins in, the melody cascades in an emotionally evocative torrent of sound.

7 Albinoni considered himself a musical dilettante, meaning that he dabbled in several musical genres for his own personal pleasure. The piece has provided the musical backdrop to dozens of films, from Flashdance (1983) to Manchester by the Sea (2016). 8 In fact, it has saturated the soundtracks of so many movies that New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane jested that the work should be banned on-screen altogether- While its use in films may border on ciché, the Adagio has become the most well-known piece of music associated with Albinoni.

Curiously, though, Giazotto never could furnish that original scrap of paper on which he had based the famous Adagio, leading scholars to question if any of Albinoni's Adagio was Albinoni's at all. Additionally, musicologist Carolyn Gianturco revealed in 1982 that other scholarship of Giazotto’s is suspect—littered with falsified sources and misleading claims. 9 Because Giazotto had long maintained that the Adagio was an inspired tribute, he finally admitted that he was indeed its only author. 10 In contrast, Adagio in G Minor is now attributed solely to Giazotto. With decades of mislabeled recordings perpetuating the 11 error; however, the fiction of Giazotto’s great discovery lives On.