Tomaso Albinoni

Albinoni is celebrated today for the brooding G minor Adagio for strings and organ that has underscored many a tearful moment in TV shows and films, from Butterflies to Rollerball, Flashdance to Gallipoli. Paradoxically, while many people still call it ‘Albinoni’s Adagio’, he himself would probably not have recognised it. The story is one of those curious enigmas when a composer’s most famous work turns out to be by someone else – just like Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary, which is now Jeremiah Clarke’s.

Albinoni followed in his father’s footsteps as a master stationer and maker of playing cards

The history of Albinoni’s signature tune is full of surprising twists: once feted as a proto-Romantic work by the Venetian Baroque composer, in the 1990s the piece was revealed to be a ‘forgery’ by Albinoni’s biographer Remo Giazotto. Giazotto claimed to have realised the from fragments of an Albinoni manuscript that