Word: haggin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...even sure of what he likes. Last week a man who knows what he likes and is quite sure that intelligent ignoramuses can be taught to know likewise published a book to mend such matters. Music for the Man Who Enjoys 'Hamlet', by B. H. Haggin (Knopf, $2.75), the Nation's music critic, is intended primarily for laymen, but might give any musical adept pleasure for the lucidity of its musical discussion...
...Haggin begins with a hypothetical citizen who enjoys the language of Shakespeare but is baffled or bored by the sounds Beethoven makes. For years, music appreciation courses have tried to break down such resistance with anecdotes about the composers' lives, or a chase after the music's recurring themes (skipping most of the music in the process...
Every reviewer has his pet theories which he will defend against all comers to the bitter and unreasonable end, especially if they are lost causes. Haggin, for instance, in his zeal for the cause of Toscanini, wrote recently in the "Nation" that he found Koussevitsky's Beethoven and Brahms "impossible to listen to." For the most part, he is a very acute critic, perhaps the most acute, but he has an uncanny nose for the unpopular attitude. When Toscanini was at the height of his glory and powers back in '36, Haggin thought he was a pedantic Italian opera hack...
...fare more chance of success than was the case in Europe until Wagner's time. We have a plethora of composers: What we lack is men writing music. Shostakovitch, the most talented and promising of the moderns, is a case in point. In his recent Seventh symphony, which Haggin of the "Nation," a top-notch critic, called "pretentious, feeble, inane, and banal," he was trying to express the heroic character of the time we live in although his own nature is unwarlike and introverted. He attempted to say with music what was in the nature of the case impossible...
...other work, the Shostakovitch Quintet, is a newcomer still' very much under dispute. Completed in the fall of '40, it won the fabulous Stalin prize and was called by "Pravda" -- "the greatest musical composition of 1940." On the other hand, Haggin of the "Nation" dubbed it fluent nonsense, so you can take your choice. Whatever its ultimate musical value, it is well worth hearing, and probably easier to grasp at first listening than the Brahms. The Quintet is, on the whole, lighter and less tense than its predecessor, the Fifth Symphony, and it is laced with the familiar Shostakovitch devices...