Few years back a
friend of mine was asked to compose a piece for a short film. She
came out with a beautiful classical guitar track, that was capturing
many human emotions. There was sadness and melancholy, but also hope,
like an image of a sunny, Sunday afternoon. It was a perfect
presentation of what one can go through while sitting in a garden,
drinking tea and romanticizing the past while also dreaming of
exciting plans for distant future. I often listen to this track on an
afternoon like this. Unfortunately, the producers of the short film
were not as pleased. Curiously, it was the variety of emotions that
worried them. They expected something people listen to when they
feel, or want to feel, simply sad. Putting it straight they wanted a
piece that would let their viewers despair. And when it comes to
despair, it is hard to think of anything more fitting than Albinoni’s
Adagio, that has been featured in so many movies that lots of people
actually believes it’s Ennio Morricone’s track.
When it comes to
Adagio in G minor, there is a phenomenal path to it, as this one
single orchestral piece has been through so many exciting and rocky
adventures that no other piece can ever compare. It is truly shameful
that many ( and I don’t mean only those who assign the autorship to
Morricone) recognize it only as soundtrack of nostalgic movies, but
it is also a side effect of its’ phenomenal popularity in modern
mainstream culture. Somehow, this neo-baroque adagio touches
something in our souls. Specifically, this side of our souls that is
a bit tacky.
But the real story
leaves a lot of speculation, and ‘Adagio’ itself is not tacky at
all. It is brilliant and sublime, gentle and uninsisting, surely not
trying to be what it has become. Remo Gazotto, the actual author of
the piece, did not expect this kind of success. I also disagree with
those who call it ‘the biggest hoax in the history of classical
music’. What about the guy who claimed he had found the original
footage of Nijinsky dancing his ‘Afternoon of the faun’, while he
just put together old photographs and was so good at editing that he
almost fooled the whole world?
The mystery can lay
in g minor itself. The tone has been forever experienced as the most
nostalgic and profound, and therefore it might sound, to all of us
non-experts, rather contemporary. The story originally presented by
Gazotto, of having found Albinoni’s unknown masterpiece in the ruin
of the library in Dresden, was definitely too good to be true, and
unmasked as a hoax it wrote itself in many romanticized stories of
experts dreaming of discovering a forgotten masterpiece. It was
indeed Albinoni’s base line found in the library’s saved
possesions, and Gazotto’s remarkable skills that allowed him to mae
it evolve into a timeless opus.
There is still a
lot of speculation about what would have become of ‘Adagio’ if it
wasn’t for this confusing story of its’ origin. Albinoni himself
would have been widely forgotten, if it wasn’t for Johann Sebastian
Bach who made him his major inspiration. And ‘Adagio’ would have
probably stopped being ‘Adagio’ without (conductor) and most
recently, Stepan Hauser the cellist. So maybe it was Gazotto’s
modesty that made him let Albinoni take the glory for his unfinished
piece. Or maybe it is ‘Adagio’ twisted fate of confused
autorship, since nowadays to so many it seems to belong to Morricone.
Link to a brilliant interpretation of Adagio by Stepan Hauser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn1gcjuhlhg
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