The Book of Job represents an attempt to wrestle with a question that has beset people of faith for millennia. Put bluntly: if God is all-good and all-powerful, why do evil and suffering exist? It is generally thought to have been written between the seventh and third centuries BCE, and forms the first of the Poetic Books of the Old Testament. Job is a God-fearing and wealthy inhabitant of the Land of Uz, blessed with a large family and comfortable existence. He becomes the subject of a conversation between God and Satan, in which the latter asserts that Job is pious only because he attributes his wealth to God, and that if he lost his family and possessions Job would surely curse God. God gives Satan permission to test this hypothesis, destroying his children, home and possessions, and then afflicting his person with a plague of boils. Yet, despite much lamenting, Job’s faith in God remains firm; God restores Job’s fortune such that his prosperity is double what it was before, he has generations of sons and daughters, and he lives to the age of 210.

Judith Weir’s In the Land of Uz sets her own compilation of texts drawn from the Book of Job, in the King James Version. It was commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and was first performed at the 2017 BBC Proms, three years into Weir’s stint as Master of the Queen’s Music. David Hill conducted the BBC Singers and The Nash Ensemble in the premiere, with the tenor Adrian Thompson as Job. While the singers and narrator carry the bulk of the action, they are also joined by a motley assemblage of instrumentalists—saxophone, trumpet, tuba, viola, double bass and organ—each with a distinct role to play.

The main events of the opening movement, ‘Prologue’, are the conversation between God and Satan and the resulting destruction wrought on Job. Alternating between a sinuous bass line and hushed upper voices in the choir, God plants the question: ‘Have you considered my servant Job?’ Whispering in God’s ear, Satan dares him: ‘Thou blessed the work of his hands, but put forth thy hands and touch all that he hath: then he will curse thee to thy face.’ The organ erupts, with a calamitous volley of block chords depicting the death and destruction raining down on Job and his family, before the choir comes in, one voice part at a time, telling Job of his ruination. Job begins a plangent monologue, in which he refuses to condemn God, stoically reflecting that ‘The Lord gives, the Lord taketh away’. It is only when Satan then bestows a plague of boils on Job’s body, from head to foot, that any sense of doubt creeps in: this point marks the entry of the viola, which (Weir tells us) functions as Job’s ‘alter-ego’, as Job’s wife advises him to ‘Curse God, and die!’.

In the second movement, ‘Lament’, Job curses his own birth and longs for death. For the most part the lament is sung by the entire choir in heavy, homophonic chords, while the viola has its own distinctive, faster motif. An incongruous, jaunty atmosphere pervades the next movement, ‘Job’s comforters’, as Job’s friends arrive and attempt to persuade him to take a more positive outlook. A jazzy tone is immediately set by the pizzicato double bass and insouciant saxophone, before the upper voices embark on an ungainly melody, characterized particularly by angular perfect fourths. When Job replies, the tonal language changes abruptly and markedly: the viola returns to the musical texture, and in long, sorrowful phrases Job tells his friends of the utter misery of his new situation. As if in response, the friends adopt a harder stance as the movement goes on, arguing that since God is always right Job’s misfortune can only be the result of misdoing on his part.

‘Where is wisdom?’ forms something of an interlude in the action, as Weir sets chapter 28 of the Book of Job in its entirety—a reflection on wisdom’s elusive nature that raises more questions than it answers. The narrator sets a pensive tone at the start, and as the movement goes on repeats the questions: ‘Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place of understanding?’ Meanwhile, the choir and accompanying instruments spend much time explaining where wisdom is not to be found, before finally proclaiming, on fanfare-like repeated tones over triumphant organ chords, that wisdom is to be found precisely in fear of God. A short movement for trumpet and organ follows; titled ‘The whirlwind’, it depicts the whirlwind out of which God will speak in the next movement. Over searing harmonies in the organ (marked by the composer ‘harsh, aggressive’ in the score), the trumpet declaims a rapid melody that is half-fanfare, half-tarantella—a frenetic wash of sound. At this point, God speaks, as the title of the next movement tells us. The lower voices of the choir, combined with the tuba (heard for the first time), represent the voice of God. God asks Job who it was who created the wonders of the world, and who it is who sees to its ongoing functioning. Finally, God asks directly: ‘Dare you deny that I am just?’ Tactfully, and with the viola constantly undergirding his melodic line, Job answers that such matters are beyond his own comprehension, and repents his own doubts.

In the ‘Conclusion’, the choir takes over the role of narrator, explaining that God restored Job’s prosperity—indeed, giving him twice what he had before and blessing him with a vast family and 140 further years of life. Saxophone, trumpet, tuba and organ combine in sonic resplendence, with expansive melodic lines in the saxophone soaring over the top of the texture. The tone hushes as we learn of Job’s eventual death, while a familiar oscillating figure returns in the viola for one final time.

The text utilized in Amy Beach’s The Canticle of the Sun is thought to have been written in 1224 by Saint Francis of Assisi, in the final years of his life. It constitutes a hymn of praise to God, giving thanks for the natural glories of creation—sun, moon, wind, water, fire and earth. The final section (thought by some to have been written while Francis was on his deathbed) then switches its focus to humanity, addressing suffering and death. Like Francis, Amy Beach found inspiration in nature, composing several works on the subject, and so it was a shrewd move of Howard Duffield, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in New York City, to give her a copy of this text in a translation by Matthew Arnold in 1915.

Yet Beach did not turn to the text for another ten years; she claimed that it was only by chance that it caught her eye, falling from between some sheets of manuscript paper in 1924. She recounted:

The only way I can describe what happened is that it jumped at me and struck me most forcibly! The text called melodies to my mind. I went out at once under a tree, and the text took complete possession of me. As if from dictation, I jotted down the notes of my ‘Canticle’. In less than five days, the entire work was done.

Quite how one interprets Beach’s claim that the ‘entire work’ was completed in these five days remains open to question. Indeed, it was not until late 1927 that she was actually commissioned to compose such a work—the request coming from H Augustine Smith, the conductor of the Chautauqua Choir.

The work is for chorus, four vocal soloists and a symphony orchestra of modest proportions. Beach clearly intended to write something that would prove appealing to and manageable for a range of forces. As she explained to her publisher: ‘It is a simple practical setting of the “Canticle of the Sun” of St Francis, and I believe that it might be largely used by choruses, schools or even churches, as it is not too difficult or too long.’ Of course, this would not be the first time that a composer has tried to persuade a publisher of the appeal and saleability of their work, but in this case the hopes were well founded: following the first performance of the version for choir and organ at St Bartholomew’s Church in New York in 1928, and then the orchestral premiere given by the Toledo Choral Society and the Chicago Symphony in 1930, the work went on to establish itself in the American choral repertoire of the early-to-mid-twentieth century with ready popularity, particularly in the version for choir and organ.

The sections of Beach’s Canticle flow into each other to create a continuous work of just over twenty minutes in length. Structurally, the piece is held together in part by two melodic motifs, which recur throughout the work. The first of these is heard right at the very opening—a repeated four-note motif in the cellos and double basses, at the bottom of the orchestral texture, over which ethereal harmonies grow. Over the course of the music it recurs countless times, both in the orchestra and sung by the choir. Beach gives no hint that this motif carries any particular extra-musical significance or meaning, but rather it serves a unifying purpose, giving a coherence to the overall work through its repetition; indeed, it also forms the very final notes of the piece. This motif provides a basis for much of the opening section of the work, which praises God first for all creation, before focusing on ‘our Brother the Sun’. Following a period of harmonic roving (in some ways not unlike the opening of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung), on the word ‘Sun’ orchestra and choir come together in a resplendent blaze of C major. Over the course of the work this chord recurs at mentions of light. This is no coincidence: Beach had synaesthesia—a condition whereby most typically one associates certain sounds with certain colours—and the harmony of C major evoked for her the colour white.

Following the robust celebration of the Sun, a tenor soloist turns to ‘our Sister the Moon’. On the word ‘Moon’, the first violins play a descending, sighing chromatic scale, which comes to form the second main motif of the work. This motif is a little less defined and slightly more mutable than the first; when it returns later in the piece it is often changed in various ways. Crucially, it is also much less strident than the first motif, and is typically featured when the softer aspects of creation are being discussed. A mezzo-soprano soloist then praises the Wind, before the two soloists come together to sing in praise of the Water.

The next section, ‘Praised be my Lord for our Brother Fire’, sees a much brisker tempo, with orchestra and choir in dialogue at the opening—the orchestra thundering the four-note primary motif and the choir responding with block-chord utterances of ‘Praised’. The word ‘Fire’ sees every member of the orchestra playing a thunderous E major chord, which harmony Beach associated with yellow. As the choir explains that it is Fire ‘through whom Thou givest us light in the darkness’, the compositional writing often takes the form of fugato—each part coming in successively on the same melodic theme, which itself is based on the main four-note motif.

The brief orchestral interlude that precedes the section praising God for Mother Earth has clear reminiscences of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with its contrary-motion chromatic scales. This marks a clear shift in focus: with attention turning to earth, now we consider humanity, and first ‘all those who pardon one another’. Here, at the mention of God’s love, the second, chromatic motif undergoes a poignant transformation: having previously descended on its past iterations, now it ascends, hopefully, as the beginning of a sensuous clarinet melody. The music eases from here into a softer vein to introduce ‘our Sister the Death of the Body’, in which all four soloists sing in alternation with the chorus, the bass adding a lament for those who die ‘in mortal sin’. Finally, the D flat major key of the Canticle’s opening returns for one last upbeat hymn of general praise and thanks to God, before the choir fades into the distance, with a final invocation to ‘serve Him with great humility’.

Joseph Fort © 2025