1. Mussorgsky's Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga may be the best-known of all musical witches, flying about in her giant mortar, living in her hut on chickens’ legs and dining on the bones of small children. Mussorgsky’s depiction of Baba Yaga in his Pictures at an Exhibition may be the most famous, although Lyadov’s symphonic poem also gets the occasional outing.

2. Berlioz's Witches' Sabbath

Mussorgsky portrayed a Witches’ Sabbath in his Night on the Bare Mountain, which Stokowski, Disney and Fantasia did so much to popularise (as did ’70s funkmeister Bob James). But perhaps the most spine-tingling Witches’ Sabbath in music is Berlioz’s Technicolor dream in his Symphonie fantastique.

3. Mendelssohn’s Andres Maienlied

Mendelssohn’s Andres Maienlied, Op 8 No 8, is also known as Hexenlied ('Witches’ Song'). Hölty’s tale of a coven celebrating the arrival of spring inspired Mendelssohn to a glorious essay in comic diablerie, with show-stopping virtuoso effects for both singer and pianist conjuring up the frantic activities of the Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken mountain-top. The Scherzo of the Octet is also said to be based on the Walpurgis Night’s Dream from the first part of Goethe’s Faust.

4. Handel's Witch of Endor from Saul

In the First Book of Samuel, Saul commands the Witch of Endor to summon up the spirit of the late prophet, as we hear not only in Handel’s oratorio Saul but also vividly in Purcell’s dramatic scena In Guilty Night.

5. Purcell's witches in Dido and Aeneas

Nahum Tate added a Sorceress and her witches to his gloss on The Aeneid. As the prologue to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas seems to refer to the marriage of William and Mary, it has even been suggested that the supernatural characters represent the evil Roman Catholic Church of the time.

6. Verdi's witches in Macbeth

When shall we three meet again? Verdi’s Macbeth is one of the highlights of his early 'galley years' but did you know there’s also an operatic treatment by Ernest Bloch? Some consider his only opera to be something of a lost masterpiece. There’s a piano piece, too: Macbeth and the Witches, by Smetana.

7. Dvořák's Noon Witch

In Karel Erben’s poem 'Polednice', the inspiration for a Dvořák tone-poem, a child is warned by his mother that the Noon Witch will come and take him away if he misbehaves. He pays no attention and the witch comes as the clock strikes noon. Father arrives home to find his wife fainted with the lad’s dead body in her arms.

8. James MacMillan's Isobel Gowdie

Isobel Gowdie confessed in 1662 to having been baptised by the devil and indulging in all manner of wicked, perverted acts. Amid hysterical scenes she was strangled at the stake and burnt as a witch. James MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie was his breakthrough work at the 1990 Proms; he describes it as 'the Requiem that Isobel Gowdie never had'.

9. Bantock's The Witch of Atlas

Shelley’s 'visionary rhyme' The Witch of Atlas concerns a mysterious cave-dwelling witch and recounts the pranks she plays on mankind. Composer and mongoose-fancier Sir Granville Bantock selected lines that concentrate on the ecstatic beauty of the Witch for his 1902 'Tone Poem for Orchestra No 5 after Shelley'.

10. Humperdinck's witch from Hansel and Gretel

Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is strangely apposite, given today’s concern about obesity and child abuse. Their witch, as portrayed in the opera by Humperdinck, at least gets her comeuppance, having abducted the two tykes and attempted to fatten up Hansel for her dinner.

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Gramophone. To find out more about subscribing to Gramophone, please visit: gramophone.co.uk/subscribe