Monday music spot: "Adagio" attributed to Tomaso Albinoni


I've previously posted about the history of this lovely Adagio for strins..

As I wrote then, most if not all of this piece was actually composed by 20th century Italian composer and biographer Remo Giazotto who claimed to have based it on a fragment allegedly found in the ruins of a library wrecked during the RAF and USAF bombing of Dresden, of a piece he thought had been composed by the the 18th-century Venetian master Tomaso Albinoni. 

The Saxon State Library which was destroyed in the 1945 Dresden bombing raids did indeed contain a substantial and irreplaceable collection of Albinoni's work sadly, it is almost certain that much of the composer's work was lost forever to allied bombs. 

However, it is more than a little suspicious that neither Giazotto (who died in 1998) or his heirs have ever produced the manuscript fragment supposedly recovered from the museum, and sceptics have described the attribution of the Adagio to Albinoni as arguably "the biggest fraud in music history."

Fraud or not, it's a beautiful piece.

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