I think my earliest memory of a descending bass line was in Saint-Saen's Marche Militaire Francais, in which the bass (and the entire string section with it) does a bunch of those drops throughout the piece.
It's way less intense in
these recordings, than I remember, though, probably because I was playing it in a strings-only orchestra. So, I was making the drops happen but also there was no wind and brass, so nothing else was going on.