ven 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. But Albinoni’s anthem marches on, turning up in the recently released Finnish movie Dogs Don’t Wear Pants set in the world of BDSM. Tomaso Albinoni was a Venetian composer (1671-1751), who, like his contemporary Vivaldi, wrote operas and instrumental music. He merits a long entry in every musicologist’s bible, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and was the subject of a 1945 monograph by Remo Giazotto, an Italian composer and musicologist. Giazotto claimed to have discovered two fragments of manuscript by Albinoni in the bombed-out Sächsische Landesbibliothek (Saxon state library) in Dresden in 1945 from which he reconstructed the Adagio. It sounds too good to be true. And it is: there were no fragments. Giazotto made it all up, the composition and the cover story, though whether for personal gain or just as an exercise is unclear. Either way, once you know the Adagio’s provenance, it’s easy to spot its various influences. The pizzicato bass line in octaves is reminiscent of Bach’s Air on a G String, the harmonic movement of the first three bars comes from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and, to add a dash of convincing period detail, a later section employs a specific form of baroque sequence. It’s pastiche then, though, unsurprisingly, from someone who had studied Albinoni, it’s informed pastiche. Such “authentic” borrowings don’t entirely explain the music’s appeal, but the lush strings, suspended chords, musical hesitations and sudden forceful entries provide rhetorical features that readily lend themselves to the fluid emotional landscapes of dramatic film. The first recording of the piece was made in Italy in 1950 and became the popular signature theme for a radio programme in France, Sinfonia Sacra. One of the programme’s presenters, Jean Witold, made his own recording in 1952. Its first appearance in movies was that same year in a sonorised version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. A movie that regularly made the list of the Top 10 of all time, and with distribution by Gaumont, this new version was probably seen by many of the film-makers that then went on to use it in their films. One can’t draw direct lines with any certainty, but the frequency which with the music is used in film and television is nevertheless striking. Another baroque evergreen, Pachelbel’s Canon, owes much of its ubiquity on our screens to its use in Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People. The baroque composition was little known before 1968 when Jean-François Paillard made an arrangement and a recording with lacework pizzicato and a thick patina of strings that radically changed its fortunes. These are not the only pieces of baroque music whose invention or modern makeover has helped them to gain a foothold in cinema. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, according to the late Bach scholar Peter Williams, was unlikely to have been written for the organ and may not have been written by Bach. Its grand guignol opening statement, a gesture like a slashing blade, was harnessed to early horror films – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Black Cat and The Raven, thereafter cropping up regularly in various knowing guises from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Rollerball to 2014’s The Babadook. But while the Toccata and Fugue has been limited in the main to horror films, despite Disney’s more abstract interpretation in Fantasia, the Albinoni has until now been used mainly to evoke sympathy. Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää, the director of Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, shares Mark Kermode’s contempt. “I couldn’t believe they used this music,” he said of the addition of Albinoni to the Manchester by the Sea soundtrack. “It’s as if [they] opened the sadness folder, and that’s the first thing [they] found.” In Valkeapää’s film, however, the Adagio stands for blandness. A widower who nearly died in his attempt to save his drowning wife, becomes addicted to sexual asphyxiation, seduced by its fleeting comfort of imagined consummation with his absent wife. Trying to put his life back on a more conventional track, he has a one-night stand. It is the Adagio that his date puts on the record player because, as she explains, it turns her on. Vanilla music means vanilla sex. Giazotto’s Adagio is here to stay, then, despite Kermode’s plea that we drop it, but Dogs Don’t Wear Pants has breathed new life into a tired trope.