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The Devil's Trill
Dreamed c.1713 by Giuseppe Tartini.
...he had a dream in which he sold his soul to the Devil, and it occurred to him in his dream to hand his fiddle to the Devil to see what he could do with it.
"But how great was my astonishment when I heard him play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away, and I awoke.
Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds I had heard. But it was in vain.
The piece I then composed, the "Devil's Sonata", was the best I ever wrote, but how far below the one I had heard in my dream!"
SOURCES: interview with Tartini (decades later) by Jerome Lalande, in his Voyage d'un Francais en Italie, (1765; v.9 p.55); quoted in Havelock Ellis's The World of Dreams (1922). Drawing by L. Bailly, 1824.
However, Stanley Krippner (in Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work With Them, p.25), denies any soul-selling: Tartini was stuck on a sonata, and dreamt he found a bottle with a demon trapped within. He freed it, asking only that the demon help him with his sonata. And it did. An act of kindness honestly rewarded, unlike both the Arabic tales of jinn and Christian tales of the devil! More like the shamanic bargains and friendships with spirits you'd find in Lappland or Siberia.
Curiously, Krippner cites Ellis's book as his source, too! Someone has to be wrong. I'm ordering Ellis now...
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