Books › Famous violinists of to-day and yesterday, 1925 › scan 56
Scan 56
Famous violinists of to-day and yesterday, 1925
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 48. See the scan on archive.org.
1In short, he imagined that he presented the devil with his violin, in order to discover what kind of a musician he was, when, to his great astonishment, he heard him play a solo so singularly beautiful, which he executed with such superior taste and precision, that it surpassed all the music he had ever heard or conceived in his life. So great was his surprise, and so exquisite his delight upon this occasion, that it deprived him of the power of breathing. He awoke with the violence of his sensations, and instantly seized his fiddle in hopes of expressing what he had just heard; but in vain. He, however, directly composed a piece, which is perhaps the best of all his works, and called it the 'Devil's Sonata;' he knew it, however, to be so inferior to what his sleep had produced, that he stated he would have broken his instrument, and abandoned music for ever, if he could have subsisted by other means."
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