Violin Sonata "Devil's Trill", B. g5

The legend says Tartini dreamed the Devil sat at the foot of his bed and played a violin sonata of supernatural difficulty and beauty, and upon waking he transcribed what he could remember. The result was this piece — the most technically demanding violin music of its era — and whether or not the story is true, it captures something essential about the music's character. The final movement, from which the nickname derives, requires the soloist to play shaking double-stops while simultaneously sustaining a melodic line: a technique that produces an eerie, almost supernatural texture no other combination of notes quite achieves. The whole sonata operates in the charged territory between control and abandon; the slow movements have a dark, ornamental lyricism that suggests something withheld, while the finale pushes into virtuosic excess that verges on instability. Tartini was working in the Italian high Baroque, and while the piece fits that tradition formally, its emotional temperature exceeds the conventions of the time. There's genuine strangeness here, an edge of transgression that distinguishes it from the more decorous productions of the same period. You'd listen to it with the lights down, giving the music your full attention, prepared to be unsettled by something that moves faster and more strangely than ordinary beauty.