Giuseppe Tartini claimed the devil appeared in a dream and played a sonata so beautiful he spent the rest of his life trying to capture it. Born in 1692 in Pirano, then part of the Republic of Venice, he was meant for the Franciscan order but instead studied law in Padua and became a skilled fencer. In 1710, at eighteen, he secretly married Elisabetta Premazore, a favorite of Cardinal Cornaro, who charged him with abduction and forced him to hide in a monastery in Assisi.

This episode follows how that exile channeled his energy into the violin, how hearing Francesco Maria Veracini in 1716 sent him into isolation in Ancona to rebuild his bowing from scratch, and how he emerged to become maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua in 1721 and founder of a legendary violin school in 1726. We cover his ownership of the 1715 Stradivarius now known as the Lipinski, his discovery of the terzo suono or third sound, his 1754 treatise on harmony, his ornamentation treatise that survived through a French translation, and his death from gangrene in 1770.

• How two sound waves interfere to create the illusion of a phantom bass note
• Why he taught students to listen for the third sound as an uncompromising tuning tool
• The cataloging nightmare of over 135 concertos and 100 sonatas he never dated
• Why he told astronomer Jerome Lalande the devil dream story himself
• How the cursed-violin myth echoed through Paganini, Blavatsky, and modern fiction