Marriage Quote by Fritz Kreisler

Duty barges into this sentence like a telegram you can’t ignore: brisk, official, almost impersonal. Kreisler frames his decision as reflex. He’d resigned his commission, he’s living in Switzerland, he’s a composer with an international career, and yet the moment war looms he “immediately” goes. The phrasing carries a quiet self-justification: not bravado, not speeches, just action. That modesty is doing work. It positions him as a man swept by obligation rather than chasing glory, which matters for an artist whose public identity depends on sensitivity and cosmopolitanism.

The subtext is the collision between two kinds of calling. One is aesthetic, self-directed, borderless; the other is national, coercive, delivered by “a wire.” Even the language shifts from personal narrative to bureaucratic machinery: “report for duty,” “calling me to the colors.” It’s the vocabulary of a state reasserting ownership over the body, and Kreisler records it without melodrama, as if the machinery’s coldness were the point.

Context sharpens the irony. Kreisler, an Austrian virtuoso celebrated across Europe and later America, became a kind of cultural passport. World War I shattered that illusion that art could float above politics. Bringing his wife along underscores how war drafts entire lives, not just soldiers. The restraint here reads as both credibility and coping: a composer translating catastrophe into the tightest possible cadence, letting the stark sequence of events deliver the emotional weight.