Tomaso Albinoni

Because the family paper business made a court or church appointment unnecessary, Tomaso Albinoni could write exactly what he wished — an independence rare in the Venice of 1700, and audible in the music. Born there in 1671 and dead there in 1751, he signed his title pages as a Venetian dilettante while working as hard as any salaried professional: at least fifty operas, beginning with Zenobia, regina de' Palmireni in 1694, of which most of the music is now lost. What survives is the instrumental output — close to a hundred sonatas, some sixty concertos, and the sets of concerti a cinque published as Opp. 7 and 9, in which an Italian composer gave the oboe a singing solo line for the first time. Bach built at least two fugues on Albinoni's themes and used his bass lines to teach harmony to his pupils. The Adagio in G minor that now carries his name is very largely the work of the twentieth-century scholar Remo Giazotto, and it should not be allowed to stand in for him. He studied violin and singing, dedicated his Opus 1 of 1694 to Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, his Opus 2 to Charles IV of Mantua, whom he may have served as a violinist, and the suites of Opus 3 in 1701 to Ferdinando de' Medici. After 1705 his operas were given in Genoa, Bologna, Mantua, Udine, Piacenza and Naples, and in 1722 Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria brought him to Munich to direct two of them. The parish register of San Barnaba records his death, of diabetes.