Giuseppe Tartini (8 April 1692 – 26 February 1770) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era born in Pirano in the Republic of Venice (now Piran, Slovenia).

Tartini was born on 8 April 1692 in Pirano (today part of Slovenia),[3] a town on the peninsula of Istria, in the Republic of Venice to Gianantonio – native of Florence – and Caterina Zangrando, a descendant of one of the oldest aristocratic Piranese families.

[4] It appears Tartini's parents intended him to become a Franciscan friar[citation needed] and, in this way, he received basic musical training.

He fled to Ancona and locked himself away in a room to practice, according to Charles Burney, "in order to study the use of the bow in more tranquility, and with more convenience than at Venice, as he had a place assigned him in the opera orchestra of that city".

According to a legend embroidered upon by Madame Blavatsky,[citation needed] Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a dream in which the Devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin.

The scholars Minos Dounias and Paul Brainard have attempted to divide Tartini's works into periods based entirely on the stylistic characteristics of the music.

He published his discoveries in a treatise "Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell'armonia" (Padua, 1754).

His treatise on ornamentation was eventually translated into French — though when its influence was rapidly waning, in 1771 — by a certain "P. Denis", whose introduction called it "unique"; indeed, it was the first published text[10] devoted entirely to ornament and, though it was all but forgotten, as only the printed edition survived, has provided first-hand information on violin technique for modern historically informed performances, once it was published in English translation by Sol Babitz in 1956.

Another copy (though less complete) of the Italian original was found among manuscripts purchased by the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, a collection that also included numerous ornamented versions of slow movements of concertos and sonatas, written in Tartini's hand.

Tartini is mentioned in Madame Blavatsky's "The Ensouled Violin", a short story included in the collection Nightmare Tales.

[11][12] Tartini, the great composer and violinist of the seventeenth [sic] century, was denounced as one who got his best inspirations from the Evil One, with whom he was, it was said, in regular league.

[citation needed] Tartini's The Devil's Trill is the signature work of a central character in Daniel Silva's The English Assassin.

[citation needed] Tartini's "The Devil's Trill" is also featured in the Japanese anime Descendants of Darkness (Yami no Matsuei).