Meaning
A final performance, appearance or piece of work, produced at or just before retirement or the end of a career; occasionally of something completed shortly before death. Neutral to gently elegiac in tone, and applied to artists, athletes and politicians alike. Neutral to literary; often carries an affectionate or elegiac shade. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The expression rests on an ancient and false legend that the swan, mute throughout its life, sings a beautiful, mournful song just before dying. Pliny the Elder dismissed the story as early as AD 77 in his Natural History. The image circulated in English literature long before the fixed phrase: Chaucer alluded to it in the late fourteenth century, and Shakespeare gave Portia a swan-like end, fading in music, in The Merchant of Venice (1596). The Phrase Finder records an early figurative use in print in 1767, in Jon Willison's Scripture Songs, which speaks of King David's swan-song, but the word became established in English only in 1831: according to Etymonline it entered as a direct translation of the German Schwanengesang, with the extended sense of a last work before a writer's or composer's death dated there to 1837.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- one's swan song
Usage Examples
- The conductor has announced that Saturday's concert will be her swan song after thirty years with the orchestra.
- Released just weeks before the label folded, the album became the band's unintended swan song.
- He insists the new engine is no swan song and that a full redesign is already under way.