In Leonard Cohen’s posthumously released song Happens to the Heart he sings this line. “Now the angel’s got a fiddle, the devil’s got a harp” which plays against the stereotype. That got me thinking about where the stereotypes come from. The angel with their harp is goes back a long time and is likely impossible to pin down. I’m interested in the other side of the story. Where did we get the idea that the devil enjoys playing the fiddle. Did it start with Charlie Daniels and the devil going down to Georgia, or does it go further back than that?
Niccolo Paganini, violin player,(1782-1840), was strongly associated with the devil.
Also from Classical Ghastlies (MPR Music Feature: Classical Ghastlies):
"The modern violin emerged in the 16th century, and was often used as an accompaniment to dancing. Peasant performers in dances were denounced in the afterglow of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic counter-Reformation. Many writers blamed the devil for the very existence of dance. The devil, as agent of death and creator of dance, bcame linked to the violin during the Renaissance period, as depicted by paintings such as Pieter Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death” and Hendrik Goltzius’s “Couple Playing, with Death Behind.”
A good article on the subject I found when doing an image search for the oldest depiction of this meme. This picture is from 1824:
Here’s the article. Yeah, it starts with the reception of Paganini.
Paganini also composed what some people consider to be the hardest violin music
From the aforementioned “Triumph of Death”:
It’s (a) Death, not a demon or the Devil, though.
Before Paganini, there was Giuseppe Tartini, who wrote the Devil’s Trill sonata, according to him in 1713, or maybe 20 years later. The 1824 picture posted above by @EinsteinsHund is an illustration of Tartini’s story: he dreamed that the devil visited him in a dream and played the piece.
That would be in the standard repertoire.
I’d bet there are much harder, insanely demanding pieces written by contemporary composers. But then, very few violonists can play them (and even fewer are willing to…).
Paganini was a violin virtuoso who composed to a large extent for himself. I wouldn’t rate him as a great composer, but what he wrote was an exemplar of very difficult. What we would call a “flex” nowadays.
Any fool can write stuff that is hard to play. Contemporary composers, especially those that have never played an instrument themselves, can write some silly hard stuff, simply because they are not as well versed in the art as they should be.
OTOH, something as apparently simple as a Philip Glass work can require total concentration to avoid messing up. And musicians can get a great deal of satisfaction from it.
The modern world is replete with guitarists with silly levels of technique who cannot compose or improvise to save their lives, and just blast out inane crud with astounding ability. There are a very few that can get both playing and composition or improvisation down.
Paganini was the Hendrix of his age.
However someone like Guthrie Govan is another jump. Nothing stands still. (Or Alan Holdsworth, probably the most influential electric guitarist of the last few decades.)
Robert Johnson was rumoured to have done the deal with the devil at a crossroads at midnight for his ability to play guitar. So it isn’t just violinists. But the jump isn’t huge.
All IMHO, you get what you paid for.
He sounds more like the Yngwie Malmsteen of his age.
I’ll give you that. But Yngwie is probably less well known. (Just)
I’d postulate that it goes back to whenever the concept that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Isn’t he the same guy associated as the antichrist?
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html
And that instrument he’s wielding looks more like a slightly shrunken cello. 
Just a quick hijack and a nitpick.
I very much doubt that there are (m)any contemporary composers who cannot play an instrument with some real proficiency. Usually it’ll be the piano.
While many people don’t care much for contemporary classical, composers are not hacks. They know their stuff. Moreover, "contemporary classical is a useless umbrella term that encompasses a huge variety of styles, from the easy-listening minimalism of Glass to the most esoteric hardcore stuff Ferneyhough with almost every shade of neo- and post- movements to the unclassifiables, the latter being the most interesting in my view.
Paganini also played guitar, and we all know what a diabolic instrument the guitar is. Wikipedia sez he only played it in intimate settings and not for the public. There are YouTube videos of his guitar music, which I’ll be checking out tonight or tomorrow, if I remember.
He supposedly said something like, “I am the master of the violin, but the guitar is the master of me.”
Heh, so it possessed him? 