Tartini and the Devil's Trill: a Sonata Born from a Dream
The devil playing the violin in a dream: the story Tartini told the astronomer Lalande and the G minor sonata that still bears the name of that vision.
Among the legends of Western music, few have enjoyed the fortune of Giuseppe Tartini's dream. The violinist, born in Piran, in Istria, in 1692, and dead in Padua in 1770, said that he had seen the devil in a dream playing the violin with superhuman skill. From that vision the G minor sonata we know as The Devil's Trill is said to have been born. The story has reached us through a precise witness, and this sets it apart from many anonymous rumours.
The Account Given to Lalande
The source is the French astronomer Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande, who met Tartini during his journey to Italy and reported his words in the Voyage d'un François en Italie, published in 1769. According to that account, Tartini dreamed that he had made a pact with the devil, who placed himself at his service. To test him, the musician handed him the violin, and the devil performed a sonata of such beauty that it left him breathless.
On waking Tartini seized the instrument and tried to recall what he had heard. The piece he drew from it, he said, was the best he had ever written, yet it remained far below the one heard in the dream. The musician told Lalande that he would have broken his violin and given up music for ever, had he been able to live without it. The story, then, speaks more about the limits of the artist than about a real infernal pact.
An Uncertain Date
Lalande places the dream in 1713, when Tartini was barely over twenty. In those years the young violinist was going through a turbulent period: he had secretly married Elisabetta Premazore, a protégée of Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro, and to escape the consequences he had left Padua and found refuge at the Sacro Convento in Assisi. Some biographers link the dream to this stay, but the coincidence cannot be proved.
The sonata also raises problems. The style of the score we know seems more mature than one would expect from a work of 1713, and many scholars believe it was composed several years later. The original manuscript is not known, and the sonata was published only in 1798 in Paris by the violinist Jean-Baptiste Cartier, in his teaching collection L'Art du violon, almost thirty years after the composer's death.
The Trill and the School of Nations
The nickname comes from the last movement, where the violinist must sustain long trills while the other fingers simultaneously play a second melodic line. It is an extremely difficult passage, which in the eighteenth century must have seemed truly diabolical, and which still tests performers today. In later performing tradition a virtuoso cadenza was sometimes added, further heightening the effect.
Beyond the legend, Tartini was one of the most important musicians of his century. From 1721 he was first violin of the chapel of the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, where he opened a school attended by pupils from all over Europe, known for this reason as the «school of nations». He also studied the physics of sound and described the so-called third tone, a pitch that can be perceived when two notes are played together in precise tune.
Tartini's dream entered the Romantic imagination and inspired stories, paintings and essays on creativity. The fact remains that the sonata, whatever its true origin, is one of the most frequently performed violin works of the Italian eighteenth century. The legend gave it an unforgettable name, but it is the quality of the writing that has kept it in the repertoire for over two centuries, in concert halls as in conservatories.