Rapture by Tom Cipullo and George Eliot (2017)

Laura Strickling, soprano
Daniel Schlosberg, piano

Brooklyn Art Song Society
New Voices Festival
May 4, 2025

Video Engineer: Jonathan Estabrooks, Emitha Records

Rapture
Text excerpted from Adam Bede by George Eliot (1819-1880)

Mary Ann Evans, known more commonly by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. A legend in her own right, she composed seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876), known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside. The text of this song is excerpted from her first novel, which follows the lives of four characters in the fictional community of Hayslope in the year 1799. Contemporary critics and readers were swept away by the author’s ability to invoke nostalgia for times gone by, as the most effective keepers of cultural heritage do. The love affair that develops into a tragic legend is aptly captured in two passionate, breathless sentences:

“Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression to silence, our love at its highest flood rushes, rushes, rushes beyond its object, and loses itself loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture.”