The tuba, along with most woodwind and brass instruments, was totally ignored as a concerto soloist during the nineteenth century, but, unlike many of its colleagues, it had no life as such before that. The trumpet, for example, enjoyed some success in the eighteenth century both in concertos and as a leading obligato instrument, particularly in sacred music. The tuba emerges during the 1850s as a replacement for such instruments as the ophicleide, used by Mendelssohn and Berlioz. In fact, when Berlioz came to prepare a German edition of his Symphonie Fantastique of 1830 in the 1850s he sanctioned the use of the tuba in place of the ophicleide in a note on the score. The tuba, however, won its greatest lease of life in the operas of Wagner, particularly those in the Ring cycle, where various different types of the instrument appear regularly.

In the rôle of soloist most have come