A swan song is a metaphor that refers to the final act, gesture, or performance given by a creative person such as a musician, actor, or artist just before they retire or die. It may also refer to the final speech or act made by a politician, business leader, or other person in power.
It is particularly associated with musicians, and one of the earliest known uses of the saying can be traced back to Franz Schubert. The Austrian composer died at the age of just 31 after his health deteriorated when he was at the height of his creativity. The official cause of death was recorded as typhoid fever, but he also showed symptoms of mercury poisoning which at the time was used to treat syphilis.
A collection of 14 songs written shortly before his death and published posthumously by Tobias Haslinger, was titled Schwanengesang, which translates directly as swansong. Earlier in his career, Schubert had also set to music a poem by Johann Senn called Schwanengesang.
Since then, many of the final works of classical composers have been considered swan songs that stand up just as well against pieces they wrote when they were younger. Examples include Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 in B minor also known as the Pathétique Symphony, Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 6 in F minor composed as an homage to his sister Fanny, and J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, an incomplete work and the culmination of his experimentation with monothematic instrumental works.
In pop music, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, and The Show Must Go On, the final track on Queen’s fourteenth studio album, Innuendo, and the last to be released while Freddie Mercury was still alive, are all examples of swan songs that have stood the test of time.
And when David Bowie released his final album Blackstar, fans had no idea that it would be his farewell album and that two days later he would die from liver cancer. His long-time producer, Tony Visconti described the album as Bowie’s intended swan song and a parting gift for his fans.
The legend that swans sing a song before they die is an ancient one. In Aesop’s fable The Swan and the Goose, a man bought a goose and swan, for former of which was intended to be fattened up and eaten, while the latter was kept for its song. When it was time to kill the goose, the man sent his cook to fetch it, but it was dark, and the cook could not distinguish one bird from the other. By mistake he picked up the swan but threatened with death it burst into song which saved its life.
Aesop was born around 620 BCE but as we cannot be certain when and even if he wrote many of his fables, it is not clear whether this is the earliest known reference to the saying.
Another Ancient Greek reference is found in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon from 458 BCE. In the play, Clytemnestra compares Cassandra’s death to a swan who has “sung her final last lament”. Over the next couple of centuries, the legend spread far and wide that it eventually became a proverb.
In Plato’s Phaedo, one of the best-known dialogues of his middle period along with the Republic, the character of Socrates says,
You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realise that they must die they sing most and most beautifully, as they rejoice that they are about to depart to join the god whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, tell lies about the swans and say that they lament their death and sing in sorrow. They do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or suffers in any other way, neither the nightingale nor the swallow nor the hoopoe, though they do say that these sing laments when in pain. Nor do the swans, but I believe that as they belong to Apollo, they are prophetic, have knowledge of the future, and sing of the blessings of the underworld, sing and rejoice on that day beyond what they did before. As I believe myself to be a fellow servant with the swans and dedicated to the same god, and have received from my master a gift of prophecy not inferior to theirs, I am no more despondent than they on leaving life.
In his account, Socrates says swans sing not only before they die but also throughout their life.
Alongside ducks and geese, swans sit in the family of Anatidae, in the genus Cygnus. They are the largest members of the family and some of the largest flying birds in the world with wingspans reaching 3 m. They are found on all continents except for Africa and Antarctica, with the Northern Hemisphere swans having pure white plumage and those in the Southern Hemisphere black and white plumage.
There are just six living species and evidence suggests the genus evolved in Europe or western Eurasia during the Miocene with the southern species branching off at an unknown later date.
Although, swans all produce vocalisations, like other members of their family, none of them can be said to have much musical ability and they certainly don’t sing before dying.
Common name | Scientific name | Found | Vocalisations |
---|---|---|---|
Mute swan | Cygnus olor | Europe, southern Russia, and China. Introduced in North America, Australasia, and southern Africa | Trumpet like call. Also grunts, whistles, snorts, and yaps. |
Whooper swan | Cygnus cygnus | Iceland, Europe, and Asia. | Loud honking sound. |
Tundra swan | Cygnus columbianus | Two forms. Whistling swan found in North America. Bewick’s swan found in Eurasia. | Bugling call. |
Trumpeter swan | Cygnus buccinator | North America. | Deep, trumpeting call. |
Black swan | Cygnus atratus | Australia. Introduced in New Zealand. | Far-reaching, musical, bugle-like sound. |
Black-necked swan | Cygnus melancoryphus | South America. | Soft, musical whistle. |
There is also the coscoroba swan (Coscoroba coscoroba) found in South America, but the species is more closely related to geese than swans. It too does not sing, but makes an onomatopoeic “cos-cor-oo” when threatened by predators, and a hooting note as a contact call between mates.
Despite the proverb’s far reach, it has long been accepted that swans don’t really sing a beautiful song before they die. In Pliney the Elder’s 10-volume encyclopaedia, Naturalis Historia, written in CE 77, he states, “observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false.”
Some zoologists though have attempted to explain where the legend may have sprung from.
The whooper swan, which was found in Ancient Greece, has a large windpipe located in a deep hollow in its sternum, which enables it to produce the resonant honks which give the bird its name. When it dies, its lungs collapse and make a series of long, drawn-out notes similar to a death rattle. Although it is far from musical, with the Encyclopaedia Britannica describing it like “a clarionet when blown by a novice in music” in 1823, this was enough for Peter Pallas, the Prussian zoologist and botanist to propose this as the origin of the myth.
Then there is the testimony of Daniel Giraud Elliot, an American zoologist and founder of the American Ornithologist Union. In 1898 he shot a tundra swan in the air and as it descended wounded to earth, he reported that it let out a series of “plaintive and musical” notes that “sounded at times like the soft running of the notes of an octave”. As the tundra swan and its close relative, the trumpeter swan, share the same convoluted tracheal loop as the whooper swan, that may have been the case, but it seems a bit of a stretch to think the noise produced gave rise to the Ancient Greek proverb.
Despite this, the idea of a swan song has permeated throughout Western culture. In The Parlement Of Foules, Chaucer describes the swan as a jealous bird “that at his death does sing.” And Shakespeare referenced the proverb multiple times, notably in The Merchant of Venice, when Portia exclaims “Let music sound while he doth make his choice; / Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, / Fading in music.”
And in one of our favourite uses of the saying, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet, philosopher, and theologian, in his brief poem On a Volunteer Singer pens a simple two lines:
Swans sing before they die — ’twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.