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 brea ...