Tomaso Albinoni was born in Venice in 1671. He became good at singing and playing the violin at a young age, and was able to work with music merely for pleasure until his father died in 1709. His father was a well-off paper merchant, but after his death Albinoni needed to provide his own form of income. Despite being the eldest son of his father, he did not have to take over his father's business (in his father's will it was left to his younger brothers) and went on to be a professional composer.

Albinoni and his music first came to the attention of the public when his first opera, Zenabia, Regina de Palmireni, and first collection of instrumental music, Sonata a tre, op 1, were performed towards the end of the 17th Century. After that he spent some time composing vocal works, such as operas and cantatas, but none of these had great success. He also wrote some 108 pieces of instrumental work.

Albinoni wrote several oboe concertos. His most famous is now known as Opus 7, and was his first composition to involve woodwind. Albinoni had his own style of oboe concertos, rather different to those of other composers, especially Vivaldi who wrote some at roughly the same time. Albinoni treats the oboe as though it is the violin (the instrument he had most to do with) by leaving barely any room for the oboist to take a breath - like on the violin, where breath breaks aren't needed. Due to this, his concertos are all very difficult for the oboe player.

Overall, Albinoni wrote many vocal works and instrumental works, including symphonies, concertos, about 50 operas, and chamber music in the form of sonatas. But his most famous work is his Adagio for Strings, which he didn't really write at all! The melody is sad but very beautiful and uplifting, and was used in the film Gallipoli. However, it turns out that Albinoni did not actually write the Adagio!

Instead, it is a 'reconstructed' piece by Remo Giazotto, an Italian musicologist. Researching Albinoni's life and music in the 1940s, Giazotto found a small piece of music manuscript in the Dresden State Library (which was later bombed). Although it seemed to have been written by Albinoni, only the bass line and six bars of melody had survived. But from this small fragment, Giazotto reconstructed (or perhaps constructed) the entire piece which lasts nine minutes, and is now the most common piece to be connected with the name of Albinoni by modern audiences. So very little of the famous 'Albinoni Adagio' is actually the composer's.