Tomaso Albinoni is remembered around the world for a single melancholy masterpiece, the Adagio in G minor, and yet he almost certainly did not write it. This episode digs beneath that 20th-century hit to uncover the real composer: a wealthy Venetian paper merchant's son who lived from 1671 to 1751, never took a salaried church or court position, and operated as a fiercely independent artist at the height of the Baroque era.

We follow Albinoni's calculated rise through high-society dedications to Cardinal Ottoboni and the Medici, his claimed output of 81 operas, and his pioneering role as the first Italian composer to publish concertos featuring the oboe as a solo instrument. We also examine why Johann Sebastian Bach built fugues on his themes, how his later manuscripts were destroyed in the 1945 bombing of Dresden, and the forensic discover ...