Instrumental music, being an abstract artform, generally shies away from attempts at conveying a narrative. The addition of words makes this task considerably easier, as they clarify the purpose of the music – though it’s the music itself that can delve into emotional subtexts only hinted at in the words.

In Mozart’s The marriage of Figaro, for instance, Cherubino’s aria ‘Voi che sapete’ tells of the young page’s surging emotions the moment he sets eyes on a woman – any woman, in fact, and there are plenty around in his day-to-day life – with the music serving three purposes. Ostensibly a song he has written himself, it has a accompaniment played by the maid Susanna, with plucked strings standing in for her guitar, embellished by a running commentary from the woodwind. But there's more to it than instrumentation: the music itself is constantly shifting from one key into another, a symbol of how much Cherubino is prey to teenage hormones.

The restlessness at the heart of Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (a setting of a scene from Goethe's Faust) is also due to a sexual awakening, but unlke Cherubino, it leaves Gretchen in a state of profound distress. The vast majority of the piano accompaniment illustrates the motion of her spinning wheel, which comes to an abrupt halt as Gretchen recalls Faust’s kiss – only for the repetitive rhythm to resume as she makes a renewed effort to concentrate on her work.

Wagner's operas occupy a middle ground of their own. There is of course plenty of text for the singers to sing, but the composer also makes use of a number of themes (or, to use his word, Leitmotifs) to represent different aspects of the story, from characters to objects and places. Towards the end of his four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelungen, for example, Siegfried is greeted by Hagen with music previously associated with the untrustworthy Alberich. This immediately lets the audience – if not the hero – know that the two characters are somehow related, and that Siegfried should be on his guard around Hagen. We won't spoil what happens next, but as Anna Russell puts it in her takedown of the Ring, rather pithily, “sure enough, there’s dirty work afoot.”

Ballet music often does something similar. The opposing forces of good and evil in Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty are immediately recognisable by the style of music to which they dance: long, lyrical phrases full of warmth for the Lilac Fairy, as opposed to something much harsher and more strident for Carabosse. That said, the lack of words can actually work to the benefit of choreographers wishing to make an old story fresh again, with fewer constraints on their interpretation.

On other occasions, composers may resort to a spoken narrative, but this is more often than not the preserve of music intended for children. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is the ur-example of this, complete with an introduction presenting all the characters together with the instruments that represent them. As such, there is no problem following the story, with additional illustrative effects – such as a descending figure in the strings as Peter, sitting in a tree, carefully dangles a rope down in the hope of catching the wolf – not needing any explanation. Other examples include the concert version of the Christmas animated film The Snowman (with a treble on hand to sing ‘Walking in the Air’), in which Howard Blake's music can serve to accompany a projection of the film, or a narrator can step in instead. The good deal of the SCO Family Festivals follow this model, including our Associate Composer Jay Capperauld’s The Great Grumpy Gaboon.

Performances of these works are understandably frequently sold on the strength of some decidedly starry narrators. On record, the English-language versions of Peter and the Wolf have boasted a who's who of talents from stage, screen and beyond, including everyone from Boris Karloff to Angela Rippon, via Sean Connery, Dame Edna Everage, David Bowie, Sharon Stone and Mikhail Gorbachev. The star of the video below, however, is arguably not Alexander Armstrong but a toss-up between the animals cast as the cat and wolf ....

At the less child-friendly end of the spectrum, Walton’s Façade is perhaps more of an honourable mention: it's a setting of poems by Edith Sitwell recited over an instrumental accompaniment, often by a pair of speakers, and devoid of any narrative. As befits a work subtitled ‘An Entertainment’, its mood is light and satirical – the latter, at least, being also true of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, the Suite from which the SCO performs in An afternoon with Simon Crawford-Phillips and SCO friends (9 March). A variation on the Faust legend, this tells of a soldier unwisely doing a (literal) deal with the Devil in exchange for his violin. It can be performed by a pair of actors – often joined by a dancer playing the princess on whom the soldier sets his sights – but in terms of recordings, it has to be said the SCO managed quite a coup by casting none other than Christopher Lee as the narrator for this dark tale.