The Silver Swan

Composer: GIBBONS, Orlando
  • The Silver Swan is a madrigal published in 1612 in Gibbons’s The First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of 5 Parts.1
  • The madrigal is a Renaissance-era “swan song,” with text written by an anonymous source:
    • The silver swan, who living had no note,
      When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
      Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
      Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
      “Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
      More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”      2
  • Listen for – the dissonance in the fifth line at the word “death” in an otherwise beautifully consonant setting.3

Sources

  1. “The Silver Swan (Gibbons, Orlando),” IMSLP, accessed October 16, 2024, https://imslp.org/wiki/The_Silver_Swan_(Gibbons%2C_Orlando).
  2. “The Silver Swan,” Poetry Foundation, accessed October 16, 2024, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50405/the-silver-swan.
  3. Maureen Buja, “From Silence to Death: The Silver Swan,” Interlude (2022), accessed October 16, 2024, https://interlude.hk/from-silence-to-death-the-silver-swan/.

Cut IDs

18749 15940