Tartini was an Italian baroque composer and violinist. By far his most famous work is the “Devil’s Trill,” which remains one of the hardest pieces on the violin ever written to date. The story of this work gave rise to his deal with the devil.
Before Tartini was famous for his skill, he was a merely adequate violinist who was allegedly very disappointed in his skills. One night he went to sleep and saw the devil in his dream, where the devil taught him how to play the violin in exchange for Tartini’s service to the devil. Tartini agreed, and he handed his violin to the devil and played the most breathtaking song Tartini had ever heard.
When he woke up the next morning, he immediately wrote down the sonata, note for note, trying to capture what he heard the devil play in his dream. That sonata eventually came to be known as the “Devil’s Trill.” The song is so difficult to play, the legend is that Tartini had a sixth finger that allowed him alone to play the work. Despite the popularity of the song (it’s still played centuries later) with audiences, Tartini wrote that the song is “so inferior to what I had heard, that if I could have subsisted on other means, I would have broken my violin and abandoned music forever.”