Mozart used the double-bass with great skill in _Don Giovanni_; but still there was no call for a solo from the double-bass. Nobody thought of attracting attention to this clumsy old growler, sedate and solemn, often severe, occasionally savage, and, at his best moments, gloomy and vague, until Beethoven gave him greater and greater importance. The next time you hear Beethoven’s _Fifth Symphony_ watch for the _Scherzo_ and listen to the double-bass. The opening bars of this movement are played as a solo by the violoncello and double-bass. The people who first heard such a strange innovation were aghast and horrified! But Beethoven made a still stranger and more striking use of the double-bass in the _Ninth Symphony_. Here he employed it with the viola as a kind of bridge leading from the sounds of instruments to human voices. Deeply, darkly, solemnly the voice of the double-bass is heard in an impressive recitative that seems to call mankind together to hear the message that the human voices have to give. Then begin the words of Schiller’s _Ode to Joy_. Verdi considered the double-bass a dark, morbid personality, particularly fitted for tragedy. He calls upon the double-bass to describe Otello’s entrance into Desdemona’s chamber when he comes to murder her. Here the double-bass darkly and wickedly mutters all that is in Otello’s savage heart and tells us just what he means to do. But, perhaps, the most striking treatment of the double-bass is in Wagner’s _Die Meistersinger_. “In this score,” Charles Villiers Stanford thinks, “you find the most economical and perfectly proportionate use of that dangerous rogue-elephant, the double-bass.” Naturally as there are no compositions written for him to shine in the front of the concert stage, there have been few great performers on the double-bass. There were, however, two very great Italian players. One was Domenico Dragonetti. He was born in 1755. Nothing was too hard for him to play, and he achieved a great reputation. He played in concerts throughout Europe. The other was Bottesini, who was born in 1822. He was also considered a wonder. He played on a three-stringed instrument of rather small size. Bottesini visited the United States with Arditi about seventy-five years ago. Dragonetti played on a Gasparo di Salò. He also owned a Stradivari. [Illustration: LUTEMAKER’S SHOP AND TWO MEN PLAYING THE DOUBLE-BASS] Double-basses by the Cremonese makers are rare. Stradivari made a few and Nicolò Amati made three or four; but Amati’s instruments are not effective in the Orchestra. Carlo Bergonzi’s are among the best ever made; for Bergonzi, as we have seen,[17] was famous for instruments of strong tone and he went back to the Gasparo di Salò model.[18] We also know that the double-bass has to keep to the Viol model; so it is not hard to see why Carlo Bergonzi’s instruments are so highly valued. CHAPTER V THE WOODWIND FAMILY