The saxtubas, which comprised a family of half-tube and whole-tube instruments of varying pitches, were first employed in Fromental Halévy's opera Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew) in 1852.

[2] In the 1770s, the French artist Jacques-Louis David carried out extensive researches into the ancient Roman instruments that appeared on Trajan's Column in Rome.

Furthermore, he designed them in such a way that the valves were hidden from general view, thus giving the impression that the instruments were primitive natural trumpets only capable of playing notes from a single harmonic series.

[7] Like Sax's saxhorns and saxotrombas, which were also covered by this patent, the saxtubas were equipped with pavillons tournants – that is to say, their bells could be pointed forward – which was considered ideal for instruments intended to be played by marching or mounted bands in the open air.

The cylinders referred to in the patent application were piston valves which allowed the player to lower the pitch of the instrument's natural or open harmonics by one or more semitones.

At the time, Sax was musical director of the Opéra's stage band (or banda), so it was not unusual for instruments of his design to be showcased in popular productions.

Although Sax appears to have designed the saxtuba as early as 1845, it is possible that he did not actually manufacture any specimens until they were required for Le Juif errant in 1852.

François-Joseph Fétis, who reviewed the opera's première, reported that the sound of the Sax's saxtuba banda was out of all proportion to that of the orchestra in the pit.

[13] Le Juif errant was not a success, despite being given fifty times over two seasons at the Paris Opéra;[14] when it disappeared from the repertoire, it took the saxtuba with it.

[15] The existence of a few saxtubas from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century – including six specimens manufactured by Sax's son Adolphe-Edouard – suggests that the instrument did not become completely obsolete after the disappearance of Le Juif errant from the repertoire.

[21] The two contrabass instruments which Berlioz says are lacking (the double-bass [contrebasse] in E♭ and the drone [bourdon] in B♭) are in fact included among the eight different sizes of saxtubas that took part in Halévy's Le Juif errant.

Berlioz claimed that the two deepest instruments (corresponding to the contrabass saxhorns listed above) did not exist, but this seems to be contradicted by both the surviving score and eyewitness accounts of Halévy's opera.

These correspond to those listed above with one addition: a small sopranino in C:[25] Forsyth's Orchestration (1914) includes seven of these, though the nomenclature is quite different, as the following table shows: Of these, only the bottom three were whole-tube instruments capable of sounding their fundamentals.

It was constructed in such a way that the column of air inside the instrument was capable of vibrating at a number of different pitches that corresponded to the notes of the harmonic series.

The whole-tube saxtubas require at least four valves for a fully chromatic range from the fundamental upwards, as the gap between the first and second harmonics is a full octave.