This week’s theme is…Pin the Tail on the Donkey! Like many music lovers I boast an extensive and comprehensive record collection. For this week, I closed my eyes and selected 5 different albums. Here’s what I picked…
Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 1 – Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni (and Remo Giazotto)
When I was growing up a fun movie was released called “That Thing You Do”, which starred Tom Hanks and Liv Tyler (I don’t think there was anyone else all that famous in the cast).
The movie follows the short story of a Beatles-like American band in the 1960s, called The Wonders. The symbolism of their name is by no means subtle – they become a one-hit wonder, the titular song rocketing them to a quick and dazzling stardom from which they fall just as quickly. The movie also works as an entertaining period piece filled with details about the music industry of that time and place. The Wonders’ hit song, which shares its title with the movie, is a clever essay by alternative rock bassist Adam Schlesinger in the idioms of the 1960s pop tune, containing all the features necessary to get you tapping your toes and humming the chorus long after its final bars have subsided:
The movie itself is something on a commentary of the phenomenon of one-hit wonderdom and inspires the question of whether it is better to be a one-hit wonder or nothing at all. I’m not sure myself, but there will always be more of them. It is such a cultural trope that there is a Wikipedia article about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder
Interestingly, there is a section of that article about one-hit wonderdom in Classical music. The list is as follows:
- Johann Pachelbel – Canon in D
- Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings
- attrib. Tomaso Albinoni – Adagio in G minor (this was actually written by Remo Giazotto and contains no Albinoni material)
- Jean-Joseph Mouret – Fanfare-Rondeau from Symphonies and Fanfares for the King’s Supper (theme to Masterpiece, formerly Masterpiece Theatre)
- Luigi Boccherini – minuet from String Quintet in E
- Jeremiah Clarke – “Trumpet Voluntary”, more properly known as “Prince of Denmark’s March“
- Jules Massenet – Meditation from his opera Thais
- Pietro Mascagni – “Cavalleria rusticana“
- Léo Delibes – “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé
- Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov – “Caucasian Sketches“
- Amilcare Ponchielli – “Dance of the Hours” from the opera La Gioconda
- Charles-Marie Widor – Toccata from Symphony for Organ No. 5
- Aram Khachaturian – “Sabre Dance” from the ballet Gayane, although Khachaturian’s “Masquerade Suite” is also well known
- Marc-Antoine Charpentier – Te Deum
- Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska – Maiden’s Prayer
I’ve often considered this in classical music – some composers really do end up fitting this description, although I think it’s worthy to point out that with classical composers it’s actually their legacy that ends up being the one-hit wonder (for more about legacy, see this post) and not the composer himself. Rock bands tend not to leave lasting legacies (not most of them anyway, and it may be too early to make statements like that) – their cycle of one-hit wonderdom plays out during their careers, as they live. But when we talk about a composer who is a one-hit wonder we are referring to a severely minuscule slice of what, in most cases, was a very robust and busy career that has remained in our popular memory. It’s hard to know why this happens, and it is fortunate for the musicians in question that their one-hit wonderdom develops posthumously, so they don’t have to face it as the survivors of the similar condition in popular music do. Still, it’s enough to make anyone spin in their grave.
If any classical composer has the right to spin in his grave over this condition I think it is Tomaso Albinoni. His career is sorely misrepresented by a single “greatest hit” that isn’t really even written by him. Today, if you hear music by Albinoni, it is probably the Adagio in g minor. It is a lovely and haunting movement for strings and organ, placid and sorrowful:
Like any classical one-hit wonder, it has been adapted by countless musicians to fit their unique styles. I’ll happily listen to the “Albinoni Adagio”, but the tragedy here is that it does not in any way give us a good or even fair sense of Albinoni’s musical speaking voice or significance. Remo Giazotto, a Roman-born musicologist who lived squarely within the boundaries of the twentieth century, and a scholar of Albinoni and his contemporaries, claimed to have discovered the figured bassline and fragment of melody which he fleshed out to create the ubiquitous Adagio. So it’s very difficult to know which parts of all of that are Albinoni and which are Giazotto. Fortunately, music can be a very collaborative art, and so we can enjoy the synthesis. Also fortunate for us is the fact that Albinoni’s music is by no means obscure – plenty of it survives and so we have ample opportunity to experience his unique and delightful voice.
Albinoni’s near-contemporary Antonio Vivaldi is without question the most famous and significant composer of Italian instrumental music of this time – his hundreds of concertos took European performers and audiences by storm and inspired the composition of countless others (see this post). Vivaldi was also a prolific opera composer (see this post). But Italy was full of composers who were writing copious amounts of instrumental music around this time. Another important figure is Arcangelo Corelli (see this post), just a little older than Vivaldi and Albinoni – his music is all sun and soft breeze, not like the hard, clear edges of Vivaldi. I think Albinoni somewhat melds Corelli and Vivaldi – we hear the rhythmic vitality and clarity of form prevalent in Vivaldi but with a soft, busy texture that brings Corelli to mind. You can hear this in the cheerful, charming opening movement of his most important set of concertos, his Opus 12 (for more about the opus system see this post):
Albinoni was feted during his lifetime as a composer of both instrumental music (his concertos and sonatas) and also operas, of which he boasted 80. He had the enviable ability to follow his musical passions without the necessity of securing a position in court or church due to the residual income from his family’s paper business, so he experienced a remarkable freedom known to few musicians then or now.
Today, after all this, and in spite of his impressive output, we know of him primarily from Giazotto’s single-movement reconstruction. Again, nothing against it. It is lovely and deeply moving; sometimes exactly the right thing to hear. But Albinoni deserves to be more than a one-hit wonder. This vibrant and successful composer who served as a bridge between the busyness of Baroque and the clarity of Classical left charming and tuneful music which could populate the concerts and libraries of so many listeners today. Don’t confuse Albinoni with the one-hit wonders of popular music – they are different phenomena and it is something of an injustice to be at the mercy of historical currents. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can become Albinoni’s newest fan.
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