Adagio

Slow, sombre and laid over a walking bass, the Adagio in G minor for strings and organ became one of the most widely heard pieces of the later twentieth century. It has carried funerals and memorial ceremonies, turned up in Orson Welles's The Trial, in Rollerball and in Gallipoli, and been arranged for guitar, brass band, choir, synthesiser and almost every other combination. Concert programmes use it as shorthand for baroque melancholy, and it is often the one baroque title an audience can name.

Its history is not the one the programme suggests. The Adagio was published in 1958 by the Milanese musicologist Remo Giazotto, who presented it as a realisation of a fragment — a bass line and a few bars of melody — that he said he had found among Albinoni manuscripts in the Saxon State Library in Dresden after the war. No such fragment has ever been produced, the library has no record of supplying one, and Giazotto in later years described the piece as entirely his own. It is a twentieth-century composition that continues to be programmed under Albinoni's name.