Laura Wright 
There has always been something slightly dangerous about a virtuoso.
When someone plays an instrument with almost impossible skill, ordinary talent sometimes seems an inadequate explanation. Paganini was accused of receiving supernatural assistance. Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul at a crossroads. Centuries earlier, the Faust legend imagined knowledge and ability purchased through a bargain with the Devil.
One of the oldest and most beautiful versions of this idea surrounds Italian Baroque violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini.
According to Tartini himself, one night in 1713 he dreamed that he made a bargain with the Devil.
Then he handed the Devil his violin.
What Tartini heard was so extraordinary that he awoke desperately trying to reproduce it.
He never could.
The music he managed to salvage from the dream became his most famous composition: the Violin Sonata in G minor, better known as The Devil’s Trill Sonata.
Who Was Giuseppe Tartini?
Giuseppe Tartini was born in 1692 in Pirano, then part of the Republic of Venice and today Piran, Slovenia.
Music was not originally supposed to become his profession.
His family intended him for the clergy, but Tartini eventually studied law at the University of Padua. He was also an accomplished fencer and developed a reputation quite removed from the quiet ecclesiastical life his family had envisioned for him.
Then came a secret marriage.
Tartini married Elisabetta Premazore against the wishes of those around them. The marriage caused serious trouble, and Tartini eventually fled Padua and took refuge in a monastery at Assisi.
It was during this period that he devoted himself intensely to music and the violin.
Tartini would eventually become one of Europe’s great violinists and teachers. In 1721, he became first violinist and orchestra director at the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, and in 1728 he established a violin school that attracted students from across Europe.
But one composition would eclipse everything else in the popular imagination.
Its inspiration supposedly came from somewhere Tartini could never revisit.
Tartini Dreams of the Devil
The story was not simply invented centuries after Tartini’s death.
Tartini himself reportedly described the dream to French astronomer Jérôme Lalande, who recorded the account in his writings on Italy.
According to the story, the dream occurred in 1713.
Tartini dreamed that he had made a pact with the Devil.
His soul was part of the bargain.
Yet the arrangement was initially rather pleasant.
The Devil became Tartini’s servant and anticipated his every desire. Tartini found himself completely satisfied with his new supernatural attendant.
Then curiosity took over.
Tartini handed the Devil his violin.
He wanted to see whether the Devil could play.
The Devil Takes the Violin
The result overwhelmed him.
The Devil began playing a sonata unlike anything Tartini had ever heard.
It possessed extraordinary beauty, precision and technical brilliance. Tartini later described himself as completely transported by the music.
This wasn’t simply a talented musician encountering someone better.
According to Tartini’s account, the music exceeded anything he had previously imagined was possible.
The experience became so intense that he could barely breathe.
Then he woke up.
And the music began disappearing.
Trying to Capture a Dream
Anyone who has awakened with a vivid dream already beginning to dissolve knows something of Tartini’s problem.
He could still remember the experience.
He could remember what the music had done to him.
But remembering every note was another matter.
Tartini immediately grabbed his violin and attempted to reconstruct what he had heard.
The result became The Devil’s Trill Sonata.
And Tartini hated the difference between what he had written and what he remembered.
“The Best That I Ever Wrote”
The fascinating part of the story is that Tartini did not regard the resulting sonata as a failure in ordinary terms.
Quite the opposite.
He reportedly considered it the finest music he had ever composed.
But compared with the music from his dream, even his masterpiece disappointed him.
In Lalande’s account, Tartini explained that the difference between his composition and the music that had overwhelmed him in the dream was enormous. He even claimed that, had he been able to live without music, he might have destroyed his violin and abandoned the profession entirely.
That detail makes the legend far more interesting than a simple story about receiving a song from the Devil.
Tartini wasn’t claiming:
The Devil gave me my masterpiece.
He was essentially saying:
You should have heard the original.
The Devil’s Trill Sonata
Today the composition is usually known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata, although Tartini’s original title was simply a violin sonata in G minor.
It became his most famous composition.
The sonata is technically demanding, particularly because of its difficult trills and double stops, passages in which the violinist must play multiple notes simultaneously. Even by modern standards, it remains a formidable work.
The surviving piece therefore creates an intriguing paradox.
Tartini believed he had failed to reproduce the music from his dream.
Generations of violinists have nevertheless struggled to reproduce Tartini.
Did Tartini Really Compose It in 1713?
The date deserves a little caution.
Tartini reportedly placed the dream in 1713, and later tradition connected the sonata directly with that experience. The University of Padua likewise describes the dream as the traditional genesis of the composition.
However, dating Tartini’s compositions can be difficult.
He often did not date his manuscripts and sometimes revised compositions long after initially writing them. Scholars therefore cannot always determine precisely when individual works reached their surviving forms.
The Devil’s Trill itself was not published until 1799, almost thirty years after Tartini’s death.
So the dream story is old and genuinely associated with Tartini, but the neat equation of dream in 1713, finished sonata immediately afterward is harder to establish with certainty.
Did Tartini Really Make a Pact With the Devil?
Tartini described a dream in which he made the pact.
That distinction became increasingly blurred as the story entered folklore.
Later versions sometimes treated the bargain as though Tartini had genuinely entered into league with Satan. His extraordinary ability with the violin became evidence that something supernatural had occurred.
The transformation is easy to understand.
A brilliant musician says he dreamed about making a bargain with the Devil.
He writes a tremendously difficult composition inspired by that dream.
The composition becomes famous.
Eventually the dream becomes a legend.
And the legend becomes a pact.
Musicians and the Devil
Tartini’s story belongs to a much larger tradition.
Exceptional musicians have repeatedly been accused of acquiring their talents through supernatural means.
The violin has been particularly susceptible to this reputation.
It can produce music of extraordinary delicacy, but it can also shriek, wail and imitate something surprisingly close to a human voice. In the hands of a virtuoso, the speed and complexity of the playing can appear almost impossible.
That made extraordinary violinists natural candidates for stories involving the Devil.
A century after Tartini, Niccolò Paganini would face similar rumors. His extraordinary appearance and seemingly impossible technique encouraged stories that he had made a supernatural bargain for his ability.
The same mythology later migrated into blues and rock music.
The instruments changed.
The bargain remained.
Madame Blavatsky and The Ensouled Violin
Tartini’s story received another supernatural interpretation through Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the famous occultist and cofounder of the Theosophical Society.
Blavatsky incorporated Tartini into her fictional story “The Ensouled Violin.”
Her treatment expanded the supernatural element considerably.
In this version, Tartini’s extraordinary musical ability was more intimately connected with demonic inspiration. His power over audiences became part of the evidence that something beyond ordinary musicianship was involved. The Devil’s Sonata was effectively another benefit of that relationship.
This is important when examining the legend today because some of the more elaborate supernatural claims surrounding Tartini do not necessarily originate with Tartini himself.
His own reported account is already strange enough.
He dreamed of the Devil.
The Devil played his violin.
Tartini woke and tried to reproduce the music.
Everything beyond that belongs increasingly to folklore and later literature.
Why Would the Devil Play Beautiful Music?
There is something unusual about Tartini’s Devil.
He isn’t particularly frightening.
There are no flames.
No monstrous transformation.
No threats.
He doesn’t drag Tartini into Hell.
Instead, he does something far more effective.
He demonstrates perfection.
Tartini hears music beyond anything he believes himself capable of creating.
Then he wakes up.
The punishment, if there is one, isn’t damnation.
It is knowing what perfection sounds like and being unable to reproduce it.
That may explain why the story has survived so well.
For an artist, that is almost a better Faustian punishment than Hell.
Music Heard in Dreams
The idea that music can emerge from dreams isn’t limited to Tartini.
Composers and songwriters have often described melodies arriving during sleep or in the strange mental state between sleeping and waking.
Dreams can recombine memories, sounds and ideas in ways the waking mind might never consciously attempt.
That provides a perfectly natural explanation for Tartini’s experience.
He may genuinely have dreamed music.
He may genuinely have awakened overwhelmed by it.
And he may genuinely have discovered that the emotional impression of the dream was far easier to remember than the actual notes.
In that sense, the story doesn’t require a supernatural explanation to be extraordinary.
The Impossible Original
There is also no way to determine how closely the surviving sonata resembles whatever Tartini heard in his dream.
We possess only his reconstruction.
The original existed nowhere except inside Tartini’s sleeping mind.
That makes the lost version permanently inaccessible.
No forgotten manuscript can be discovered.
No archive can produce it.
No historian can reconstruct it.
If Tartini’s story was truthful, the greatest music he believed he had ever heard existed for only a few moments.
Then he woke up.
Tartini’s Devilish Sonata
Giuseppe Tartini died in Padua in 1770 after becoming one of the most important violinists, composers and teachers of his era. He wrote well over a hundred violin concertos and numerous sonatas, yet his name remains inseparable from the composition inspired by that peculiar dream.
Perhaps that is inevitable.
There are thousands of stories about musicians writing beautiful music.
There are considerably fewer in which the composer insists that his masterpiece is merely an inadequate imitation of something the Devil once played for him.
Tartini spent his life mastering the violin.
In his dream, he handed it to someone better.
He woke with only a memory.
He attempted to recreate it.
What he produced became The Devil’s Trill Sonata.
And according to Tartini, we have never heard the truly remarkable version.
Only the one a human being could play.
About the Author
