Adagio in G Minor

Albinoni is virtually unique among the great composers as his popularity rests almost entirely on a piece he didn’t actually write: the haunting Adagio for organ and strings. During the 20th century, a series of musical hoaxes emerged that claimed to be rediscoveries of lost Baroque and Classical pieces, including the “Adélaïde” Violin Concerto by Mozart, which got as far as being entered in the official Köchel catalogue and recorded by Yehudi Menuhin, before French violinist/composer Marius Casadesus admitted his deception in 1977. Albinoni’s Adagio emerged in the late 1950s, claimed by musicologist Remo Giazotto (who had been researching the composer’s biography) to be based on a fragment of a trio sonata slow movement he had obtained from the collection of the Saxon State Library in Dresden. However, the library has no record of it ever having existed, Giazotto never produced the fragment and following his death in 1998, it was not found among his papers. As a result, the Adagio is now widely considered a work entirely of Giazotto’s invention.