Deal with the devil is a cultural motif, best exemplified by the legend of Faust and the figure of Mephistopheles, but elemental to many Christian folktales. Making a pact with Satan or some lesser demon in order to gain success, health, youth, knowledge, wealth, fame, or power. In exchange, the one making the deal must sell his soul, which will belong to the devil eternally after death. Great achievements were credited to a contract with the Devil, from the numerous European Devil's Bridges to the violin virtuosity of Niccolò Paganini to the "crossroad" myth associated with Robert Johnson and the Blues culture. One of the earliest known musical works that explore the motif of bargaining with Satan is Giuseppe Tartini’s “Violin Sonata in G minor,” more familiarly known as the Devil's Trill Sonata (Italian: Il trillo del diavolo.) It’s Tartini’s best-known work, which the author considered his best work for a long time. However, he turned on himself, saying that after all he had heard in his life, his own music felt so inferior that “if I could have subsisted on other means, I would have broken my violin and abandoned music forever."
Tartini claimed that he wrote the sonata in 1713. Scholars, on the other hand, think it was likely composed as late as the 1740s, due to its stylistic maturity. But critics and academics are often compensating for their own shortcomings (otherwise, they would be musicians, not critics or scientists,) so I’d take those claims with skepticism. The sonata was published in 1798 or 1799, almost thirty years after the composer's death.
The work was popular (and still is) among musicians because of the hard passages for solo violin it contains. The sonata became the basis for Cesare Pugni's 1849 ballet “Le violon du diable,” as well as Chopin's “Prelude No. 27.” The story behind the music is also interesting. Tartini told his friend, the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande, that he had dreamed that the Devil had appeared and suggested that he would like to be Tartini’s servant. The complete story was told by Tartini himself in Lalande's “Voyage d'un François en Italie”:
“One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.”
