The Devil's Trill Sonata: An Analysis (Part 3 - The Second Movement)

cdlawrieofficial
May 30, 2021
3 min read

This is the 3rd part in a five-part series thoroughly analyzing Giuseppe Tartini’s The Devil’s Trill Sonata. If you want to learn about the history of Tartini and the fascinating story behind the piece, click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2 in which I broke down my favourite 1st movement!

I’ve coined this second movement “The Dance into Hell.” It’s almost comical in comparison to the last one as the whimsical opening melody, combined with the orchestral accompaniment echoing its last few notes, elicits this vision in my mind of all the demons of Hell welcoming Tartini into the underworld. It’s celebratory, in a funny way, the tragedy and loss of the previous movement having completely vanished. And we can see this difference in the sheet music (4:03 – 4:08 in the video linked here):

The flow of the 12/8 time signature is no longer, replaced with a quip 2/4. Since I bashed the common 4/4 for its restrictiveness in the last part, one would think I’d barrage this time signature for the same reason. However, I think it works here, as there’s emphasis on only a few notes that are held for equal time for the melody to then dissolve into brisk triplets and grace notes. It doesn’t feel constrained to me, rather swift and preppy as it’s intended to be. I can’t say it looks clean, but it feels like a tiny little package wrapped up nicely with a big red bow on top. Now, let’s look at the rest of the movement:

It isn’t called The Devil’s Trill for nothing, now, is it? While these aren’t the famed double stop trills, they’re still trills; and there’s a lot of them. They add to the playfulness, yes, but also to the difficulty, for certain. Especially when the player takes into account the speed with which it’s played, I can only imagine those quick trills begin to add up fast. And it keeps going…When just glancing at it and briefly taking it in for what it is, the whole movement essentially looks like the sample I placed above. These relentless sixteenth notes, sprinkled generously with trills, at a break-neck speed. It’s something to conquer I imagine.

Moving away from the technicalities, if we think about movements as chapters to the story, it’s hard not to theorize on the purpose behind a lighthearted movement succeeding the previous of such tortured expression (other than irony, perhaps, or contradiction). The problem is that Tartini didn’t consciously write the piece. I’m sure he paraphrased some aspects and took time to place the pieces of the puzzle he couldn’t quite remember in such a way as to be discernable, but this was really a creation of the subconscious mind (if you don’t believe that the devil actually came to the composer in his sleep and fed him this masterpiece). On the one hand, there’s a certain freedom in this that mirrors that of the energy of the piece itself; if we go by the belief that there was no real intent behind any of it, then anyone can assign any interpretation and twist any technical choices to hold the meaning they see fit. One could take my interpretation in that these are the sounds of Tartini’s condemnation to Hell being celebrated, that he found a certain freedom now no longer with his detaining human body and is being rejoiced by others who made the same choice, doomed to revel in that and with each other for eternity. But that’s just how I hear it, the same way I rationalized my critique of the time signatures and rhythm. There’s no rhyme or reason other than what the listener hears and chooses to assign for themselves. In reality, anyone can do that with any piece, classical or not. That’s the wonderful thing about music, in that it’s interpretable. No matter what the creator claims it was written for, or about, or what meaning it’s supposed to hold, everyone will find their own meaning in it. But with a piece like this, there’s an extra freedom in thinking that it was a surprise, a gift, even to Tartini and that the rest of the world has just been given something wonderful to experience and hold within themselves. No strings attached.

In Part 4 of this continuing series, we’ll listen to the brief but powerful 3rd movement!

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