Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (1671 – 1751) was an Italian
Baroque composer. His output includes operas,
concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments,
sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day
as an opera composer, he is known today for his
instrumental music, especially his concertos. He is
also remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G
minor", attributed to him but said to be written by
Remo Giazotto, a modern musicologist and composer, who
was a cataloger of the works of Albin...(+)
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (1671 – 1751) was an Italian
Baroque composer. His output includes operas,
concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments,
sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day
as an opera composer, he is known today for his
instrumental music, especially his concertos. He is
also remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G
minor", attributed to him but said to be written by
Remo Giazotto, a modern musicologist and composer, who
was a cataloger of the works of Albinoni.
Born in Venice, Republic of Venice, to Antonio
Albinoni, a wealthy paper merchant in Venice, he
studied violin and singing. Relatively little is known
about his life, which is surprising considering his
contemporary stature as a composer, and the
comparatively well-documented period in which he lived.
In 1694 he dedicated his Opus 1 to the fellow-Venetian,
Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (grand-nephew of Pope
Alexander VIII). His first opera, Zenobia, regina de
Palmireni, was produced in Venice in 1694. Albinoni was
possibly employed in 1700 as a violinist to Charles IV,
Duke of Mantua, to whom he dedicated his Opus 2
collection of instrumental pieces. In 1701 he wrote his
hugely popular suites Opus 3, and dedicated that
collection to Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of
Tuscany.
In 1705, he married Margherita Rimondi; Antonino Biffi,
the maestro di cappella of San Marco was a witness, and
evidently was a friend of Albinoni. Albinoni seems to
have no other connection with that primary musical
establishment in Venice, however, and achieved his
early fame as an opera composer at many cities in
Italy, including Venice, Genoa, Bologna, Mantua, Udine,
Piacenza, and Naples. During this time, he was also
composing instrumental music in abundance: prior to
1705, he mostly wrote trio sonatas and violin
concertos, but between then and 1719 he wrote solo
sonatas and concertos for oboe.
Unlike most contemporary composers, he appears never to
have sought a post at either a church or noble court,
but then he had independent means and could afford to
compose music independently. In 1722, Maximilian II
Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, to whom Albinoni had
dedicated a set of twelve concertos, invited him to
direct two of his operas in Munich.
Around 1740, a collection of Albinoni's violin sonatas
was published in France as a posthumous work, and
scholars long presumed that meant that Albinoni had
died by that time. However, it appears he lived on in
Venice in obscurity; a record from the parish of San
Barnaba indicates Tomaso Albinoni died in Venice in
1751, of diabetes mellitus.
His instrumental music attracted great attention from
Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote at least two fugues on
Albinoni's themes (Fugue in A major on a theme by
Tomaso Albinoni, BWV 950, and Fugue in B minor on a
theme by Tomaso Albinoni, BWV 951) and frequently used
his basses for harmonic exercises for his pupils. Part
of Albinoni's work was lost in World War II with the
destruction of the Dresden State Library. As a result,
little is known of his life and music after the
mid-1720s.
The famous Adagio in G minor, the subject of many
modern recordings, is thought by some to be a musical
hoax composed by Remo Giazotto. However, a discovery by
musicologist Muska Mangano, Giazotto's last assistant
before his death, has cast some doubt on that belief.
Among Giazotto's papers, Mangano discovered a modern
but independent manuscript transcription of the figured
bass portion, and six fragmentary bars of the first
violin, "bearing in the top right-hand corner a stamp
stating unequivocally the Dresden provenance of the
original from which it was taken". This provides
support for Giazotto's account that he did base his
composition on an earlier source.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomaso_Albinoni).
Although originally composed for Violin & Basso
Continuo , I created this Interpretation of the Sonata
in D Minor (Op. 4 No. 1) for Oboe & Strings (2 Violins,
Viola & Cello).
SHEET MUSIC