reproducing the music he had just heard, but the arch fiend had departed and his music with him! Nevertheless, Tartini sought pen and music-paper and immediately composed the sonata which bears the devil's name. It is the best of Tartini's works, but so far inferior has its composer declared it to be to the music which he heard in his dream that he said he would have smashed his instrument and abandoned the art for the remainder of his life could he have subsisted by any other means.
It was thoughtful of the devil to improvise his sonata in the style of the eighteenth century. What if it had occurred to him to dash off Leo Ornstein's Opus 31? Could Tartini have remembered the notes and set them down? I doubt it. As it is, we have Tartini's word for the fact that the music as performed was infinitely more extraordinary than his transcription of it. Memory is treacherous at best, and to remember a whole sonata, taking in at the same time the virtuosity of the devil and the glamour of his presence, which must have shared interest with his playing, must be adjudged a remarkable feat. Broad, sweeping, sensuous melodies, and rapid, dashing cascades of notes, to be played with devilish abandon, alternate in this music. If Tolstoy had been more familiar with musical literature he might have found this composition more to
