Job, a masque for dancing

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Job: A Masque for Dancing is a ballet written by the famous British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was written between 1927 and 1929 and premiered in 1930, conducted by Vaughan Williams himself. The score is dedicated to the conductor Adrian Boult.

The ballet is based on William Blake's work Illustrations of the Book of Job and was conceived by the scholar Geoffrey Keynes and the artist Gwen Raverat, who then approached Vaughan Williams with a request to write the score (RVW and Raverat were cousins).

The work is commonly separated into 12 different parts:

1. Introduction
2. Saraband of the Sons of God
3. Satan's Dance of Triumph
4. Minuet of the Sons of Job and Their Wives
5. Job's Dream
6. Dance of the Three Messengers
7. Dance of Job's Comforters
8. Elihu's Dance of Youth and Beauty
9. Pavane of the Sons of the Morning
10. Galliard of the Sons of the Morning
11. Altar Dance
12. Epilogue

Vaughan Williams was so taken with the idea that after an abortive attempt to secure a staging from Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, he abandoned hope of any stagings and created a score that was much larger-scale than any conventional theater pit would be able to handle. The first performance, in October of 1930 at the Norwich Festival, was a concert performance with full orchestra; Constant Lambert then created a reduced orchestration suitable for a theater pit orchestra, and this is how the work was first staged in June of 1931 at Sadler's Wells. That same summer the American dancer Ted Shawn created an outdoor production for the Lewisohn Stadium concerts in New York City, which was scheduled for three performances in July 1931.

In 1948 the staging moved from Sadler's Wells to Covent Garden, whereupon the full orchestra could be used; unfortunately the original Raverat set designs would no longer suit the much larger stage and new set designs were commissioned from John Piper.