adagios‏

by richibi

a friend writes,

“Richard,
I thought I could rely on you to call an adagio by it’s right name! If not you, I ask, who can I trust? Certainly not Colin. I asked him about andante and he thinks it is slightly undercooked pasta! In all seriousness though Richard, we do forgive you and we do most enjoy you subllime cultural offerings.”
 
yes, and thank you, and adagios are of course very long
Spanish goodbyes, as in “adagios amigo”  
 
 
they don’t often stand alone, they’re usually part of a greater
composition, Classically in the middle, between two more
sprightly movements, and the form didn’t especially change
even through the later, Romantic, Impressionistic, and more
modern even musical periods 
 
when they have stood alone they’ve usually been excerpted
from a composer’s larger composition for its individual
potency and mass appeal, intact, or sometimes modified,
and often modified even further, time begins to tell 
  
 
two adagios stand out in musical history  
 
Albinoni’s, 1671 -1751, would’ve been the middle movement
of a trio sonata – three instrumentalists playing three individual
pieces as a musical unit – according to Remo Giazotto, musicologist
1910-1998, who’d found fragments, he said, in the burned out
remains of an archive in Dresden after the Second World War
 
later it was determined to be Giazotto’s very own composition,
not at all Albinoni’s  
 
wow, man
  
 
Barber’s “Adagio for Strings“, was lifted from his String Quartet,
Op. 11, again from the customary middle, and arranged for string
orchestra, to universal approbation, a bud turned into an oracular 
flower, speaking for millions 
 
 
adagios are slow, usually mournful affairs, often transformed
into profound, even transcendental, reverence 
 
 
 
Richard