B. H. Haggin - Career

Career

He was music critic of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1934 to 1937, and from 1936 to 1957 was music critic of The Nation. From 1946 to 1949, he wrote a column for music on the radio for The New York Herald Tribune.

Haggin was a staunch but not entirely uncritical admirer of the conductor Arturo Toscanini. Their personal friendship lasted from Toscanini's early years in the late 1930s conducting the NBC Symphony to 1950, four years before Toscanini's retirement. He was the first major American critic to recognize choreographer George Balanchine. In the 1930s, he had launched the career of the future record producer John Hammond, hiring him as a reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Haggin wrote twelve books on music and two on ballet. He was the author of the first general guide to recorded classical music, Music on Records (1938), later expanded as The Listener's Musical Companion (1956), which Haggin regularly updated in new editions until 1978. His best-known books are about Toscanini: Conversations with Toscanini (1959), a personal reminiscence and the closest thing to a series of interviews with the publicity-shy Toscanini that has ever been published, and The Toscanini Musicians Knew (1967), a series of interviews with musicians who played or sang under the venerable Italian maestro. The two volumes were republished in 1989 as Arturo Toscanini, Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro. He was one of the few critics who became a personal friend of the conductor, and therefore had unprecedented access to him until 1950, four years before his retirement.

Haggin's books on Toscanini were deliberately written as a corrective to what Haggin felt were misinformed opinions and misrepresented facts about Toscanini which were beginning to circulate at that time.

As a critic, Haggin was trenchant, imperious and meticulous, with little patience for mediocre music, musicians or fellow critics. He engendered enmity by criticizing RCA Victor for issuing badly engineered or equalized recordings of Toscanini and "enhancing" them with echo-chamber effects, treble-peaking and/or pseudo-stereo sound. He was strongly critical of the interpretive style of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who at the time was considered Toscanini's polar opposite and greatest rival. Nor was he ashamed to make value judgments about composers and works that offended some readers and endeared him to others. When Toscanini gave the American premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony in 1942 in which the maestro heard the "suffering of the Russian people" at the hands of the German invaders, Haggin, his greatest and most perceptive admirer, dissented, declaring it "an inflated monstrosity of straining, portentous banality." He also made some of his most passionate pronouncements from the standpoint of "meta-criticism," sometimes spending more column inches in criticizing his fellow critics' opinions than in expressing his own sentiments on the music or performers in question.

In his later years, he wrote for The Hudson Review, The New Republic, Musical America and The Yale Review.