Swan song
Encyclopedia
"Swan song" is a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, effort, or performance given just before death or retirement. The phrase refers to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan
(Cygnus olor) is completely silent during its lifetime until the moment just before death, when it sings one beautiful song. The belief, now known to be incorrect, had become proverbial in Ancient Greece
by the 3rd century BC, and was reiterated many times in later Western poetry and art.
' Agamemnon from 458 BC. In the play, Clytemnestra
compares the dead Cassandra
to a swan who has "sung her last final lament". Plato
's Phaedo
records Socrates
saying that, although swans sing in early life, they do not do so as beautifully as before they die. By the third century BC the belief had become a proverb. The English phrase "swan song" or "swan-song" dates to the 19th century, and entered the language from the German
schwanen(ge)sang and schwanenlied.
In reality, Mute Swans are not actually mute during life – they hiss – and they do not sing as they die. This folktale has been contested ever since antiquity: in 77 AD, Pliny the Elder
provides the first surviving refutation in Natural History (book 10, chapter xxxii: olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis), stating: "observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false." Peterson et al. note that Cygnus olor is "not mute but lacks bugling call, merely honking, grunting, and hissing on occasion."
Nevertheless, the folktale has remained so appealing that over the centuries it has continued to appear in various artistic works. Aesop
's fable of "The Swan Mistaken for a Goose" alludes to it: "The swan, who had been caught by mistake instead of the goose, began to sing as a prelude to its own demise. His voice was recognized and the song saved his life." Ovid
mentions it in "The Story of Picus and Canens": "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song."
Chaucer
wrote of "The Ialous swan, ayens his deth that singeth." In Shakespeare
's The Merchant of Venice
, Portia exclaims "Let music sound while he doth make his choice; Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music."
The well-known Orlando Gibbons
madrigal
"The Silver Swan" states the legend thus:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
made comic use of this legend when he quipped ironically:
Tennyson
's poem "The Dying Swan
" is a poetic evocation of the beauty of the supposed song and so full of detail as to imply that he had actually heard it:
Finnish
composer Jean Sibelius
's tone poem The Swan of Tuonela in a famous solo, uses a cor anglais
to play the dying song of the legendary swan of Tuonela
.
referring to a final theatrical or dramatic appearance, or any final work or accomplishment. It generally carries the connotation that the performer is aware that this is the last performance of his or her lifetime, and is expending everything in one magnificent final effort.
Agatha Christie's famous mystery novel And Then There Were None
includes, as a plot device, a gramophone record
titled "Swan Song." When played, it accuses the houseguests and servants of murders for which they were not punished for various reasons. The killer intends to punish the wicked as a final act.
Robert R. McCammon
's book Swan Song
tells the story of a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world
who will be the savior of the human race.
Anton Chekhov
's first play is a one-act sketch titled "Swan Song," which he wrote in 1887. It is about an actor and a prompter who find themselves locked inside
a theatre late at night, discussing the actor's past in his career.
Mute Swan
The Mute Swan is a species of swan, and thus a member of the duck, goose and swan family Anatidae. It is native to much of Europe and Asia, and the far north of Africa. It is also an introduced species in North America, Australasia and southern Africa. The name 'mute' derives from it being less...
(Cygnus olor) is completely silent during its lifetime until the moment just before death, when it sings one beautiful song. The belief, now known to be incorrect, had become proverbial in Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
by the 3rd century BC, and was reiterated many times in later Western poetry and art.
Origin and description
The earliest known reference to the idea that swans sing one beautiful song before dying first appears in AeschylusAeschylus
Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often described as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos , meaning "shame"...
' Agamemnon from 458 BC. In the play, Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra or Clytaemnestra , in ancient Greek legend, was the wife of Agamemnon, king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Mycenae or Argos. In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, she was a femme fatale who murdered her husband, Agamemnon – said by Euripides to be her second husband – and the Trojan princess...
compares the dead Cassandra
Cassandra
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy...
to a swan who has "sung her last final lament". Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Phaedo
Phaedo
Plato's Phaedo is one of the great dialogues of his middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's seventh and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days .In the dialogue, Socrates...
records Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
saying that, although swans sing in early life, they do not do so as beautifully as before they die. By the third century BC the belief had become a proverb. The English phrase "swan song" or "swan-song" dates to the 19th century, and entered the language from the German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
schwanen(ge)sang and schwanenlied.
In reality, Mute Swans are not actually mute during life – they hiss – and they do not sing as they die. This folktale has been contested ever since antiquity: in 77 AD, Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
provides the first surviving refutation in Natural History (book 10, chapter xxxii: olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis), stating: "observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false." Peterson et al. note that Cygnus olor is "not mute but lacks bugling call, merely honking, grunting, and hissing on occasion."
Nevertheless, the folktale has remained so appealing that over the centuries it has continued to appear in various artistic works. Aesop
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek writer credited with a number of popular fables. Older spellings of his name have included Esop and Isope. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a...
's fable of "The Swan Mistaken for a Goose" alludes to it: "The swan, who had been caught by mistake instead of the goose, began to sing as a prelude to its own demise. His voice was recognized and the song saved his life." Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
mentions it in "The Story of Picus and Canens": "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song."
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
wrote of "The Ialous swan, ayens his deth that singeth." In Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic...
, Portia exclaims "Let music sound while he doth make his choice; Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music."
The well-known Orlando Gibbons
Orlando Gibbons
Orlando Gibbons was an English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods...
madrigal
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
"The Silver Swan" states the legend thus:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
made comic use of this legend when he quipped ironically:
Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....
's poem "The Dying Swan
The Dying Swan
The Dying Swan is a ballet choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1905 to Camille Saint-Saëns's cello solo Le Cygne from Le Carnaval des Animaux as a pièce d'occasion for the ballerina Anna Pavlova. The short ballet follows the last moments in the life of a swan, and was first presented in St....
" is a poetic evocation of the beauty of the supposed song and so full of detail as to imply that he had actually heard it:
Finnish
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
composer Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
's tone poem The Swan of Tuonela in a famous solo, uses a cor anglais
Cor anglais
The cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....
to play the dying song of the legendary swan of Tuonela
Tuonela
Tuonela is the realm of the dead or the Underworld in Finnish and Estonian mythology. Tuonela, Tuoni, Manala and Mana are used synonymously. In Estonian mythology, it is called Toonela or Manala....
.
Idiom
By extension, "swan song" has become an idiomIdiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
referring to a final theatrical or dramatic appearance, or any final work or accomplishment. It generally carries the connotation that the performer is aware that this is the last performance of his or her lifetime, and is expending everything in one magnificent final effort.
Agatha Christie's famous mystery novel And Then There Were None
And Then There Were None
And Then There Were None is a detective fiction novel by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939 under the title Ten Little Niggers which was changed by Dodd, Mead and Company in January 1940 because of the presence of a racial...
includes, as a plot device, a gramophone record
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
titled "Swan Song." When played, it accuses the houseguests and servants of murders for which they were not punished for various reasons. The killer intends to punish the wicked as a final act.
Robert R. McCammon
Robert R. McCammon
Robert Rick McCammon is an American novelist from Birmingham, Alabama. His parents are Jack, a musician, and Barbara Bundy McCammon. After his parents' divorce, McCammon lived with his grandparents in Birmingham. He received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Alabama in 1974. McCammon...
's book Swan Song
Swan Song (novel)
Swan Song is a 1987 horror novel by American novelist Robert R. McCammon. It is a work of post-apocalyptic fiction describing the aftermath of a nuclear war that provokes an evolution in humankind.- Plot :...
tells the story of a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization due to a potentially existential catastrophe such as nuclear warfare, pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, impact event, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics, supernatural...
who will be the savior of the human race.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
's first play is a one-act sketch titled "Swan Song," which he wrote in 1887. It is about an actor and a prompter who find themselves locked inside
No Exit
No Exit is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original French title is Huis Clos, the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors; English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out...
a theatre late at night, discussing the actor's past in his career.