Adagio Tomaso Albinoni | arr. Jacob de Haan About Adagio Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751), the eldest son of a wealthy merchant, was born in Venice. At an early age, he became proficient in singing and especially in playing the violin. He soon started composing music. Albinoni lived and worked in Venice his whole life, and he visited the cities of Florence and Munich. In his youth, Albinoni composed church music, but not successfully. In 1694, his work was noticed when his first opera, Zenobia, regina de Palmireni, was performed in Venice. That was also the year in which his first instrumental music appeared. After that, he mainly concentrated on vocal composition (such as operas and cantatas) and instrumental composition (such as sonatas and concertos). The Albinoni Adagio is based on a manuscript that was discovered in the Dresden State Library after the Second World War by Remo Giazotto, a Milanese musicologist who was working on Albinoni’s biography at the time. Only the bass line and six measures of melody were there – they probably belonged to the slow movement of a Trio Sonata. Around 1945, Giazotti reconstructed the presently famous Adagio that has made Albinoni known to a wider public. Ironically enough, Albinoni himself would probably hardly recognize the piece.