Swan song

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The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.^[1]

It has been thought since antiquity that this notion is false. "Mute" swans are not actually mute during life – they produce snorts, shrill noises, grunts, and hisses – and they do not sing as they die.

In A.D. 77. Pliny the Elder refuted it in Natural History (book 10, chapter xxxii: olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis, "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."^[2]

Nevertheless, the legend 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.^[3] Ovid mentions it in "The Story of Picus and Canens."^[4]

The well-known Orlando Gibbons madrigal (The Silver Swan) states the legend thus:

The silver Swan, who living had no Note,

when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.

Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,

thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:

"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!

"More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."

Chaucer wrote of "The Ialous swan, ayens his deth that singeth".^[5] In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Portia declaims "Let music sound while he doth make his choice;/Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,/Fading in music."^[6]

Tennyson's poem "The Dying Swan"^[1] 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:

The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul

Of that waste place with joy

Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear

The warble was low, and full and clear; ...

But anon her awful jubilant voice,

With a music strange and manifold,

Flow’d forth on a carol free and bold;

As when a mighty people rejoice

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold...

[edit] Idiom

By extension, swan song has become an idiom 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. Billy Nay's one-act play, The Swan Song (1887), describes an aging actor who, while sitting alone in a darkened theatre, ruminates on his past. Agatha Christie's famous mystery novel And Then There Were None includes, as a plot device, a gramophone record entitled "Swan Song." When played, it accuses the houseguests and servants of murders that, for various reasons, they were not punished for. The killer intends to punish the wicked as a final act.

A posthumous collection of songs by Franz Schubert is customarily referred to as the Schwanengesang (German for swan song).

Robert R. McCammon's book entitled 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 entitled "Swan Song", which he wrote in 1887. It is about an actor and a prompter who find themselves locked into a theatre late at night, discussing the actor's past in his career.

[edit] References