Job, le Procès de Dieu

What is, what should be – the mind grasps the difference, and names it: Evil. The idea of unjust suffering, the events that make us fear the imminent end of a cycle, of a civilisation, or quite simply of the world, all this is at the heart of our questions in a recurring way. However, we can see that this perception is as old as humanity itself. In The Dialogue of the Unfortunate with His Soul, a text known in Egypt since the Middle Kingdom, or in the babylonian Poem of the Just Suffering, the mystery of unjust suffering is addressed and pointed out as an emblem of a disorder constitutive of the march of our world. The Book of Job is, in our civilisation, the place par excellence where this questioning unfolds. I turned to this book when Leonardo García Alarcón approached me about a musical project in which music and text come together to rediscover an aesthetic and ethical necessity through art. A chamber opera, musical theatre or sacred drama, the work for which I wrote the libretto and music is intended to re-examine the subtle questions posed to us by the Book of Job, in the light of the recent dramatic events of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, but also of other dramas that question our relationship with others, with the environment and with ourselves.The libretto thus combines a rewriting of the Book of Job with sung dialogues and eight contemporary texts [drawn in part from my book Chant d’Artsakh (© 2021 – Éditions de l’Aire, Vevey)] that are dramatised and recited. The main plot is therefore a terrible wager between God and Satan – is it for nothing that Job fears God, he to whom no grace has been refused? Then begin two series of trials, the first taking away from Job all his possessions and his children, the second attacking his physical integrity and placing him ‘in the dust and ashes’, emblems of death. ‘Curse God and die!’ suggests Job’s wife, who refuses. Three of Job’s friends come to visit him: in three cycles of increasingly short and eventful exchanges, they first try to console him, then warn him and finally accuse him. The underlying idea of their words is as follows: there is no suffering without fault, and through the ordeal Job must have the humility to recognise it. ‘You are unfortunate comforters, the devil’s masks,’ Job will say. For it is an additional ordeal that the compassion of these self-righteous people, secretly happy not to suffer the same fate and intuitively considering themselves more righteous, more in line with divine expectations. God’s intervention at the end of the opera will bring them a scathing denial. Thus, Job allows himself to be neither consoled, warned nor accused because he experiences an inner paradox – he knows that retributive justice exists, and at the same time he knows that cause and effect reasoning does not apply to his case. Logically, this should imply divine wrongdoing – but initially Job cannot bring himself to consider it. This is why he begins by cursing the day of his birth: as is often the case, the victims of the worst mistreatment, abuse or injustice first look for the fault within themselves, as the enormity of their suffering cannot be due to chance. The title Job, the Trial of Gods is therefore ambiguous: the trial is the one that God seems to bring against Job by exposing him to the blows of the Adversary, but also the one that Job brings against God for making him suffer this. The booklet then asks two questions, two ‘whys’ that are expressed, in the original Hebrew of the Book of Job, by two distinct words. There is the why of causality, and the why of finality. Why is Job suffering, for what reason? For what purpose is Job suffering, for what goal? (These passages are indicated by ‘to God’ and are sung by Job and the choir). Job and his friends search for the answer to the first why without finding it. At the same time, they are answering a question they were not asking themselves – the ‘why’ of causality. Indeed, at the end of his trials, Job will change his perception: ‘My ear had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you,’ he says in his final dialogue with God. When he does appear, he seems to give completely the wrong answer, offering Job a lesson in astronomy and geology, before describing a kind of decalogue of animals, ways of indicating to Job the limits of his knowledge and his power. The ultimate divine response is a strange evocation of two cosmic animals, the Behemoth and the Leviathan, which have been variously perceived by historical interpreters and modern exegetes, who agree in seeing through them the evocation of spiritual entities and whose creation by God manifests his domination over violence and disorder. The opera is carried by the discreet gaze of Yemimah, Job’s daughter, who was born after the disasters but is present from the opening of the opera and also intervenes in the middle and at the end. This childlike figure is like an opening to the future – in a poetic impulse, the reality of the Old Testament and its actualisation through more contemporary texts come together here. Despite the latent threat expressed by Job (‘It’s not about to stop, it’s going to start again. No one will be able to stop them, no one will be able to console us’) and its geopolitical realisation in the Armenian case (the indigenous population of Nagorno-Karabakh was completely expelled from its historical lands in 2022), it is possible to continue living, marvelling at the world by recalling ancient beauties – the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, the cypress of Abarkouh, the oldest tree in Iran, and the reminder of the first origins – ‘Noah’s first vine in the Ararat valley’. The vocal writing calls on a wide range of registers, and each solo voice embodies a plurality of characters or, in the case of the tenor, a plurality of faces of Job. The five soloists are joined by three female voices that function as a choir, often reinforced by the participation of the soloists. The instrumental format is inspired by Sumerian and Babylonian configurations, which accompanied two types of singers, the Nar who celebrated festive events and victories, and the Gal who were dedicated to lamentation. In these orchestras, plucked strings (harps and lyres), double flutes and various percussion instruments, played by women, predominated.To recreate the spirit of these ancient orchestras, I chose instruments that evoke the traditional, baroque and contemporary worlds, and I sought to create bridges between the families of instruments that share comparable functions or construction: the qanûn, for plucked strings, echoes the theorbo and the guitar, as well as the pizzicato strings, the flute and the clarinet respond to the cornetto, cornett or recorder, the percussion creates links between the worlds, as does the accordion which, not really belonging to any of the worlds, incorporates them all. Finally, the work is structured on four levels: the celestial level, the terrestrial level, the strong scenic space and the inner space.
Job, the Trial of God is a look back to allow us to project ourselves, to allow us to hope in spite of everything, and to envisage a better future by attempting to re-enchant the world. It also forces us to recognise that, despite our technical and scientific progress and our increased historical awareness, meaning sometimes eludes us – if we are to look for one. But this hope is not just a vague, passive and resigned spirituality. To blame God and rebel against his absence is still to proclaim him in the negative and to express one’s need for transcendence. ‘Even now my complaint is rebellion, but suffering stifles my sighs,’ says Job.