Word: haggin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...street." Fellow Critic John Simon fulminated in New York Magazine: "The APA production of The Misanthrope is as bad as . . . as . . . it is hard to find an adequately monstrous simile. As bad-let me try-as its review by Clive Barnes." Dance and Music Critic B. H. Haggin briskly summed up Barnes' critical efforts as "uncomprehending nonsense." The critic's critics have not been entirely unjust. Barnes' manic dance criticism often reads more like promotion than analysis. And frequently a drama review will come down with logorrhea simply because he didn't have time to write...
Sometimes Music Critic B. (for Bernard) H. (for nothing) Haggin looks around in concert halls and sees people under a spell. Not the spell of a dazzling performance or a moving composition, but the spell of ""a long-established ritual without reality or meaning - performers and listeners going through the motions of esthetic response to a piece of music in which the composer went through the motions of esthetic creation." For 44 years, Haggin has been playing the role of the music world's prince uncharming, turning out acerbic books and articles aimed at snapping his readers...
This week the publication of a revised and expanded version of his 1956 book, The Listener's Musical Companion, shows that Haggin, at 66, is as snappish as ever.* "Accepted opinion finds greatness in every note set down on paper by a great composer like Bach or Mozart," he writes. "I hear in some works dull products of a routine exercise of expert craftsmanship. Accepted opinion holds some symphonies and concertos of Brahms to be works of tremendous profundity; I hear in them only the pretension to profundity." Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and Mussorgsky rank higher with Haggin than with most...
...write these things just to be quarrelsome," says Haggin. "I write them because I have strong feeling about music. And I correct wrong ideas. The discovery that most critics were writing nonsense was what started me off." A liberal arts graduate of the City College of New York, he "drifted" into writing for the Nation in 1923 and, except for a three-year stint on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the '30s, has reviewed concerts and records for a variety of intellectual weeklies and quarterlies ever since...
Ripping Pockets. As seen from the orchestra ranks, Toscanini awesomely lived up to the nicknames he earned as a young student at the Parma Conservatory: "Napoleon" and "il genietto" (the little genius). Many of the musicians quoted by Haggin still quake at the memory of his fierce glare, which took in the whole orchestra but made each player feel that it was focused on him-usually in reproach. And then there were the tantrums. When a piece was not played as Toscanini wanted it, "his irritation used to start at his feet and rise," recalls Bassoonist Sol Schoen-bach...