The Dying Swan (The Swan)
Choreography · Michel Fokine (1905)
music by Camille Saint-Saëns - "Le Cygne" ("The Swan"), the 13th movement of Le Carnaval des Animaux (1886), originally scored for cello and two pianos. Fokine's 1925 published edition uses a piano transcription by Alexander Pero.
A solitary swan, near the end of its life, moves across the water on trembling, ceaseless toe-steps as its wing-like arms rise and fall in a struggle to take flight. Its efforts to rise grow more urgent and effortful, alternating between fragile hope and exhaustion, before the strength finally drains from its body. Sinking to one knee, the swan folds its wings a final time and dies. The piece has no plot beyond this single image - Fokine described it not as a literal portrayal of a bird, but as a symbol of "the everlasting struggle in this life of all that is mortal."