In 1713, the Italian violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini claimed he dreamed of making a pact with the devil, handed over his violin, and heard a sonata of such impossible beauty that he woke gasping for air. He grabbed his instrument and tried to capture what he had heard, producing the Violin Sonata in G minor now known as the Devil’s Trill. Yet Tartini considered his masterpiece a pale shadow of the dream and said that if he did not need music to survive, he would have broken his violin and quit forever. This episode draws on the account he gave to the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande and on modern acoustic and stylistic analysis.

We dig into the chronological mystery: Tartini dated the dream to 1713, but the sonata’s galant style points to the 1740s, suggesting either self-mythologizing or three decades of obsessive revision. We break down the four movements, the deceptive cadences, the cantabile passage thought to depict Tartini falling asleep, and the notorious trill technique that asks the left hand to sustain a rapid flutter while playing arpeggiated chords. Finally, we follow the sonata’s afterlife: Fritz Kreisler’s added cadenza, its publication in Cartier’s L’Art du Violon nearly thirty years after Tartini’s death, an 1849 ballet, and its influence on Chopin.

• The full story of the devil’s dream as Tartini told it to Lalande, and why he wanted to destroy his violin afterward
• Why scholars place the composition roughly thirty years after 1713 based on its galant style
• How the Devil’s Trill turns a decorative ornament into a core narrative device decades before Romantic program music
• The biomechanics of the trill passage and why the piece is a fifteen-minute endurance test for the performer
• How a sonata unpublished at Tartini’s death in 1770 went on to inspire the ballet Le Violon du Diable and a Chopin prelude