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 Stra ...