Music for the Royal Fireworks
The contrabassoon is a supplementary orchestral instrument and is most frequently found in larger symphonic works, often doubling the bass trombone or tuba at the octave. Frequent exponents of such scoring were Brahms and Mahler, as well as Richard Strauss, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The first composer to write a separate contrabassoon part in a symphony was Beethoven, in his Fifth Symphony (1808) (it can also be heard providing the bass line in the brief "Janissary band" section of the fourth movement of his Symphony No. 9, just prior to the tenor solo), although Bach, Handel (in his "Music for the Royal Fireworks"), Haydn (e.g., in both of his oratorios "The Creation" and "The Seasons", where the part for the contrabassoon and the bass trombone are mostly, but not always, identical), and Mozart had occasionally used it in other genres (e.g., in the "Coronation Mass"). Composers have often used the contrabassoon to comical or sinister effect by taking advantage of its seeming "clumsiness" and its sepulchral rattle, respectively. A clear example of this can be heard in Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (originally scored for contrabass sarrusophone). Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is one of the few orchestral works that requires two contrabassoons.