Satan writes the World’s Hardest Violin Sonata
Giving the blues to Robert Johnson was far from Satan’s first musical collaboration. For that, we have to travel back to 18th-century Italy, and the violinist and composer, Giuseppe Tartini. Tartini was born in Istria in 1692, and studied law at the University of Padua. Music, however, was his real passion, and he learned the violin in his late teens when hiding from a corrupt Cardinal with designs upon his young wife in a Franciscan monastery. Though he had received some rudimentary musical instruction as a boy, his rapid mastery of the violin seemed nothing short of miraculous. Or diabolic…
Tartini’s best-known composition is Violin Sonata in G minor. The sonata, involving a complex series of double-stop trills, is perhaps the most technically-demanding of all violin pieces. But how did he compose it? Let’s ask Tartini: ‘One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with The Devil for my soul… I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy.
‘I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the “Devil’s Trill”, but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me’.