How a Finnish BDSM movie breathed new life into Albinoni’s Adagio
Film soundtracks from Flashdance to Gallipoli have called upon the stately spare sadness of Albinoni’s Adagio, so much so that it has been denuded of meaning. The work itself isn’t even authentic.
Even if you don’t listen to Classic FM or have an album called something like “Baroque Classics”, the chances are that you’d recognise Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. It crops up with tiresome regularity in films and on television. Of the nearly 100 instances of music by the baroque composer listed on IMDb, 90% are the famous Adagio, showing up in Orson Welles’s The Trial, Rollerball and Flashdance.
Probably the best-known example is Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, where the piece accompanies the opening and closing credits, its crashing climaxes synchronised with the name of the film in blood-red letters. The final sequence, where the Anzac troops storm the beaches and meet their fate, was parodied in Inbetweeners 2 when Will, spattered in excrement, splashes into a swimming pool, causing everyone to flee. Indeed, the Albinoni has proved so ubiquitous that Mark Kermode demanded a moratorium on its use when he reviewed Manchester by the Sea – it brings only “corny cultural clutter”, he wrote.