Parenting & Family Quote by Franz Lehar

There is something almost operatic about how calmly this line shuts the door on life. Lehar, a composer who made a career out of turning yearning, comedy, and heartbreak into melody, speaks here like someone cueing the final bar: the work is done, the stage is cleared, and the last entrance is inevitable. The phrasing is telling. "Finished with all earthly business" makes death sound less like tragedy than administration - a ledger balanced, obligations paid off, the worldly noise finally quiet. That dry practicality undercuts sentimentality; it is resignation with a craftsman's pride.

Then he pivots: "and high time too". That sharp little aside is where the subtext lives. It's impatience, maybe exhaustion, maybe a sly acknowledgement that longevity can become its own burden. Coming from an artist whose most famous works luxuriate in romantic excess, the emotional austerity hits harder. It's as if the man who once orchestrated swoons is now refusing the big swell, choosing plain speech as a kind of honesty.

The address - "my dear child" - softens the line without sentimentalizing it. It's intimate, domestic, almost backstage. Death isn't a philosophical abstraction; it's a moment shared with a younger witness, a final act of caretaking that also admits vulnerability. The repetition "Yes, yes" reads like self-steadying, the way someone talks when they're trying to make a hard thing simple. Lehar frames dying as an arrival, not a rupture: "now comes death", like the next scheduled scene. That composer's sense of timing is the whole point.