The Devil in a Dream

Ah, bed. It has to be one of my favourite things. I’m also a bit of a dreamer as you may have gathered; but rather than writing an amazing violin sonata, I sing in my sleep—with the groan of a goblin. Apparently.

However, Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) was visited in his dreams. Not by a groaning goblin; but the devil. Here is the account given to French astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande in 1769.

‘One night I dreamt that I had made a bargain with the Devil for my soul. Everything went at my command—my novel servant anticipated every one of my wishes. Then the idea struck me to hand him my fiddle and 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 flight 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 that I had heard. But it was in vain. The piece I then composed, the Devil’s Sonata, although the best I ever wrote, how far below the one I heard in my dream!’

The Devil’s Trill Sonata Tartini trasncribed after the encounter, wasn’t nearly as good. The trills weren't what he thought they should be, and Tartini was quite an expert on ornaments. Not porcelain figurines—although he could very well have enjoyed those too—but he certainly loved a trill, was partial to an appoggiatura and relished a mordent. 

If you are not a musician, you are probably wondering what on earth I am talking about, but here is an example of the trills in the Devil’s Trill sonata David Garrett - Devil's Trill Sonata. Incidentally, David Garett also played Paganini in the film The Devil’s Violinist. Clever guy!

Anyway, trills aside, Tartini was a bit of a mystic. He believed in music being a supernatural gift, and although he didn’t end up joining the priesthood as intended, he appreciated St Anthony’s tongue. It’s okay, lots of people did, and still do. There's a feast day dedicated to him and everything. 

You see, like Tartini, St Anthony was visited by the devil in a dream. However, instead of playing him a violin sonata; he granted him the gift of communication. When St Anthony gave a sermon, people could always understand him, no matter what language they spoke, and it was St Anthony’s mission to unite the world. In a similar way, Tartini used his music. He believed music was universal, not only in the reading of the language, but in a way everyone can understand and appreciate. He transcibed the folk songs of the local fisherman and farmers in order to share them with the world in an all-embracing sense, not just for their nationalistic significance. 

We’ll talk a bit more about that in the next part, but something struck me. It appears that rather than the devil stealing Tartini and St Anthony’s soul for the purposes of evil; the opposite seems to be the case. 

Perhaps the devil's foot slipped and he accidentally kicked a goal for the opposition? Actually, that did happen to me once. I was a midfielder in my school soccer team, and I accidentally misjudged the direction of a pass. It was highly embarrassing, and by the way, just in case you had the impression that I don’t appreciate football, I do indeed love soccer—as we call it in Australia.

Oh, and just before we move on, here is a nice picture of the devil on the end of Tartini’s bed by Louis-Léopold Boilly in 1824.

 When it comes to the devil appearing in a dream, we often encouter duality. The German gothic novels of E.T.A Hoffmann (1776-1822) have been said to contain ‘divine miracles and diabolic magic.’ In the Sandman, we have the ‘angelic image’ of Clara juxtaposed by the Sandman or Coppelius as he came to be known:

 ‘He (the Sandman) is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.'

It’s quite the tale about rolling eyes and enchanted glass; an automated doll with which the protagonist Nathaniel becomes enamoured, and finally goes mad. It's also not a story for children. 

The Nutcracker isn’t quite so bad. The story was originally called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Alexandre Dumas wrote a version too, and of course Tchiakovsky turned it into a ballet. There are many musical references in the book, so that makes sense...ooh, maybe Violetta and the Venetian Violin could be a ballet? That would be fun!

'A Room Full of Feathers' from Violetta and the Paganini Poltergeist.

Anyway, in Hoffman’s tale, the little girl Marie is given a nutcracker—a toy soldier—by her clockmaker godfather made ‘ugly’ by the curse of the seven-headed mouse. All these exciting things happen, including talking dolls, battles and wardrobes leading to other lands; but because little Marie has ‘wound fever’ she is thought to have dreamt it. Either way, she ends up saving him from the curse, they get married and live in a castle made of Marzipan.

E.T.A.Hoffman was also a big fan of music, and Mozart in particular. He was a conductor as well as an author and loved Mozart so much, he even gave himself another middle name—Amadeus. He also loved dreams, or nightmares in the case of the Sandman, and if you are prone to those, perhaps it’s best not to read it.

But we couldn’t talk about dreams and music and not discuss Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). You might remember, he was a friend of Paganini, living in Paris around the same time, however, Berlioz had a slight problem with Opium. His Symphonie Fantastique is indeed fantastic, in every sense of the word. It depicts the dreams of a lover, impassioned and subsequently maddened by his obsession. The writer, François-René de Chateaubriand referred to these as Vague des passions and these inspired the premise of Berliozs’ work. His Symphonie Fantastique is program music, meaning that it is accompanied by prose, and some of it goes as follows;

‘This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.’

It all ends up rather dramatically with a witche’s sabbath and a march to the scaffold; but it really is an incredible piece to play. In fact, I have fond memories of playing for the first time at National Music Camp when I was seventeen. Those were the days when I was blithely unaware of my short-comings as a violinist, and just played my heart out. Of course, this was interspersed with lots of dips in the swimming pool, games of soccer and late-night table-tennis matches, among other things…

Anyway, it goes to show dreams can do strange things to our minds. Our minds are so precious too and the line between sanity and madness is sometimes quite thin. However, many great musicians appear to have been born with bigger than average brains, and one of those men was Amadeus Mozart.

#tartini #etahoffmann #nutcracker #sandman #devilstrillsonata #devilinadream #symphoniefantastique #berlioz