Giuseppe Tartini (8 April 1692 – 26 February 1770) was an Italian composer and violinist.  Allegedly – according to Tartini – he dreamed that the Devil had come to him in a dream and asked Tartini to be his servant. In exchange, the Devil would give him a sonata.

Which the Devil played.

Tartini immediately woke up and wrote the sonata from memory – and it was the most popular piece of music of his career. 

But he lamented that what he had written was not as good as what the Devil had played.  In Tartini’s words, his sonata was “so inferior to what I had heard, that if I could have subsisted on other means, I would have broken my violin and abandoned music forever.”

Take that, Charlie Daniels!