Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (8 June 1671 – 17 January 1751) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. His output includes operas, concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments, sinfonias, and solo cantatas.[1] While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music, especially his concertos.[2] He is best remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G minor", attributed to him but largely written byRemo Giazotto, a 20th-centurymusicologist and composer, who was a cataloguer of the works of Albinoni.[3]
Albinoni was born inVenice, at the time part of theRepublic of Venice, but now in Italy. His father was Antonio Albinoni, a wealthy paper merchant. Tomaso studied violin and singing; in 1694, he dedicated his Opus 1 to the fellow-Venetian, CardinalPietro Ottoboni (grand-nephew ofPope Alexander VIII). His first opera,Zenobia, regina de Palmireni, was produced in Venice in 1694. Albinoni was possibly employed in 1700 as a violinist toCharles 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 toFerdinando de' Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany.[2]
In 1705, he married Margherita Rimondi. At the ceremony, Antonino Biffi, themaestro di cappella ofSan Marco was a witness, and evidently was a friend of Albinoni. The Albinonis had six children but their names are not recorded.
Unlike most contemporary composers, he appears never to have sought a post at either a church ornoble court, but rather had independent means through which he could afford to compose music without a salaried position. 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 inMunich.Part of Albinoni's work was lost inWorld War II with the destruction of theDresden State Library. As a result, little is known of his life and music after the mid-1720s.
Around 1740, a collection of Albinoni'sviolin 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, ofdiabetes mellitus.[4] He was 79 years old.
Engraving of Italian composers Tomaso Albinoni,Domenico Gizzi (Egizio) and Giuseppe Colla byPietro Bettelini, after a drawing by Luigi Scotti
Most of his operatic works have been lost - either because they were never published or because they were destroyed. However, nine collections of instrumental works were published. These met with considerable success and consequent reprints. He is therefore today better known as a composer of instrumental music (99 sonatas, 59 concerti and 9 sinfonie). In his lifetime these works were compared favourably with those ofArcangelo Corelli andAntonio Vivaldi. His nine collections published in Italy, Amsterdam, and London were either dedicated to or sponsored by an impressive list of southern European nobility. Albinoni wrote at least fifty operas, of which twenty-eight were produced in Venice between 1723 and 1740. Albinoni himself claimed 81 operas (naming his second-to-last opera, in the libretto, as his 80th).[5][6] In spite of his enormous operatic output, today he is most noted for his instrumental music, especially his oboe concerti (from12 Concerti a cinque op. 7 and, most famously,12 Concerti a cinque op. 9). He is the first Italian known to employ the oboe as a solo instrument in concerti (c. 1715, in his op. 7) and publish such works,[7] although earlier concerti featuring solo oboe were probably written by German composers such asTelemann orHändel.[6] In Italy,Alessandro Marcello published his well-known oboe concerto in D minor a little later, in 1717. Albinoni also employed the instrument often in hischamber works and operas.
His instrumental music attracted great attention fromJohann Sebastian Bach, who never visited Italy but had access to Italian music, particularly when working inWeimar for the ducal court. Bach wroteat least two fugues on Albinoni's themes (Fugue in A major on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni,BWV 950, andFugue in B minor on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni, BWV 951) and frequently used hisbasses for harmonic exercises for his pupils.
The famousAdagio in G minor, the subject of many modern recordings, is thought by some to be amusical hoax composed byRemo 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 thefigured bass portion, and six fragmentary bars of the first violin, "bearing in the top right-hand corner a stamp stating unequivocally theDresden 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.[8]
^Giazotto, Remo (1945) Tomaso Albinoni : musico di violino dilettante veneto : (1671–1750) : con il catalogo tematico delle musiche per strumenti, 197 esempi musicali e 14 tavole fuori testo; Milano : F.lli Bocca.
^Nicola Schneider, "La tradizione delle opere di Tomaso Albinoni a Dresda", tesi di laurea specialistica (Cremona: Facoltà di musicologia dell'Università degli studi di Pavia, 2007): pp. 181–86.
Bibliography
Eleanor Selfridge-Field,Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York, Dover Publications, 1994.ISBN0-486-28151-5
Franco Rossi:Catalogo Tematico delle composizioni di Tomaso Albinoni Tomo I – Le 12 opere strumentali a stampa – edition "I Solisti Veneti", Padova 2002
Franco Rossi:Catalogo Tematico delle composizioni di Tomaso Albinoni Tomo II – Le opere strumentali manoscritte – Le opere vocali – I libretti – edition "I Solisti Veneti", Padova 2003
