During his career, Mozart wrote one concerto for each of the four primary
woodwind instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. (The so-called second flute concerto is
merely a transposition of the concerto for oboe.) Of these, the one for bassoon came first,
when Mozart was only eighteen years old.
Aside from a very early trumpet concerto, now lost, the bassoon concerto
was Mozart’s first for any instrument other than the piano. The work was written in
Mozart may have been inexperienced as a composer of concertos when he wrote the present work, but it is clear that he understood the bassoon well. The first and third movements feature jovial, dance-like themes that are well suited to the bassoon’s intrinsically buoyant character, while the second movement shows off the instrument’s capacity for simple lyricism. The orchestra is appropriately sparse, employing only a pair each of oboes and horns to go along with the usual string section, thereby facilitating the proper balance with a solo instrument not capable of competing with a full orchestra in terms of sheer volume.
Mozart could not have imagined his concerto performed with a euphonium on the solo part, but the euphonium ends up being similar to the bassoon in its agility and roundness of sound (particularly in the lower register). The euphonium was invented in around 1840 by the Belgian Adolphe Sax, better known for his invention of the woodwind instruments that bear his name, the saxophone family. Sax’s aim was to develop a brass instrument whose range would lie between that of the horn and the tuba, while maintaining the mellow sound characteristic of those instruments and somewhat lacking in the trombone. He was not alone in recognizing this need; the great composer Richard Wagner had the same goal in mind when creating his tenor tuba (or “Wagner tuba”), which is similar. Like the saxophone, the euphonium is known primarily as a band or wind ensemble instrument, but its sound is well at home with the timbres of an orchestra.