Music which sets Biblical texts can hardly help but be theological, in some sense at least; although it is sadly true that composers often overlook scholarship on the Bible as such when considering their musical depictions. A relatively recent book that I have read suggests that the book of Job is more comedic than the tragic wallowing in suffering that is typically associated with it; it is certainly true that the text is open to the possibility of irony.

In music, however, it is often the darker side of its dramatic presentation that is explored, and this is the case in the work under consideration here, the organ cycle Job by the twentieth-century Czech composer Petr Eben, commissioned by the Harrogate International Festival and first performed in Ripon Cathedral on 11 August 1987 by David Titterington.

In eight movements Eben reflects musically on Destiny, Faith, Acceptance of Suffering, Longing for Death, Despair and Resignation, Mystery of Creation, Penitence and Realisation, and God’s Reward. Within these, let us focus on Faith; a Faith maintained in the midst of suffering.

The eruptions of that suffering are made audible in juddering throbs and in incisive stabs; the cognitive dissonance that can appear between faith and suffering are similarly illustrated with attempts at assertion in octaves disintegrating into major ninths. The thread of faith holding together through these assaults consists of references to plainchant; indeed the first tempo direction is ‘tempo di corale gregoriano’.

Specifically, and noted in the preface to the score, the movement opens with reference to the exsultet, the Easter proclamation – itself making an explicitly Christological refence within the framework of illustrating a text from the Hebrew Bible – and ends with a gloria in excelsis. Both, notably, refer to the songs of angelic choirs – those with whom we mortals join our voices in liturgical singing. There is also implied in this selection a trajectory from proclamation to rejoicing which we might think useful as an illustration of the journey of faith and Christian formation.

Eben had known suffering – descended from Jews, though raised Catholic, he had been interned in Buchenwald during the Second World War, and subsequently took a different sort of mistreatment in Soviet Prague for his refusal to join the Communist Party and his insistence on continuing to attend church.

This movement of Job presumably reflects the faith of the title character, but perhaps it reflects also, or even more, Faith as a common experience of believers: not always uninterrupted, nor easy, but building from hearing the Good News through various travails, difficulties, and disappointments, towards the angelic chorus and, indeed, in the context of this cycle and the Christian life, God’s Reward. As the movement is superscripted: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.