see his pupils gathered about him, every one striving to do his best for his master's jubilee feast; to hear in all their compositions a simple and natural expression, free from all that _bizarrerie_ which prevails with the majority of composers of our time, and for which we are in the main indebted to one of our greatest German artists; free, I say, from that _bizarrerie_ which links the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, the heroic with the whimpering, the most sacred themes with buffoonery,--and all without discrimination; so that the hearers are goaded to frenzy instead of dissolving in love, and tickled into senseless laughter rather than raised toward heaven. The fact that this miserable _bizarrerie_ has been proscribed and exiled from the circle of his pupils, so that their eyes may rest on pure, holy Nature, must be a source of lively satisfaction to the artist who, with a Gluck for a pioneer, has learned to know Nature, and has clung to her in spite of the most unnatural influences of our day." [Illustration: Fac-simile letter from Schubert, to committee of Austrian Musical Society which accompanied his score of the C-minor symphony. Original in possession of the "Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde" in Vienna.] Now the person here mentioned as "one of our greatest German artists" can hardly be any other than Beethoven, and the following clauses, in which the _bizarrerie_ ascribed to him is defined, give expression to the stock objections that were urged in those days, by an unintelligent public and by musicians of narrow vision, against his music. Did the youthful Schubert mean to echo and approve these shallow criticisms? Sir George Grove seems to think so, and quotes from the same diary a passage, dated three days earlier, in which most intense love and admiration is expressed for Mozart's music; from which it is inferred that there can be no doubt to which of the two great masters Schubert was most strongly attached at that time. Kreissle, on the other hand, without offering any explanation of the passage above quoted, simply comments on it as a series of "somewhat misty and confused remarks."