B. H. Haggin

A lifelong resident of New York City, he graduated from the Juilliard School in 1920 as a piano major. He published his first article in 1923, and his career as a journalist commenced shortly thereafter as a contributor to The New Republic.

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 the late 1930s, shortly after Toscanini started conducting the NBC Symphony, which the network had enlarged from its house orchestra for him, on Christmas night 1937, to 1950, four years before Toscanini's retirement. He was the first major American critic to recognize choreographer George Balanchine. Also in the 1930s, he 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.

Haggin was one of the few critics who became personally close to Toscanini, who gave him access to private documents and other utterances that he had never permitted to any other author. The Haggin books were designed to serve as a corrective to factual errors, and to what Haggin regarded as misinformed opinions, which had already begun to circulate in the American media.

As a critic, Haggin showed little patience for mediocre music, musicians or fellow critics. He criticized RCA Victor for issuing badly engineered or mastered recordings of Toscanini and "enhancing" them with echo-chamber effects, treble-peaking and/or pseudo-stereo sound. (Partly because of Haggin's complaints, later editions of those recordings did without such interventions.) In addition, Haggin was strongly critical of the interpretive style of Romantically inclined conductors who often deviated from the printed score like Wilhelm Furtwängler, who at the time was considered Toscanini's polar opposite and greatest rival. Nor was he loath to make value judgments about some later Romantic (like Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss) and many leading twentieth-century composers and works; such outspokenness offended some of his readers, and endeared him to others. Even Toscanini's own repertoire choices were by no means always safe from Haggin's censure. For instance, when Toscanini gave the American premiere of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in 1942 (he described this symphony as epitomizing the "suffering of the Russian people" at the hands of the German invaders), Haggin dissented, declaring the piece to be "an inflated monstrosity of straining, portentous banality." Also Haggin 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 various long essays for The Hudson Review, The New Republic, Musical America, Encounter, and The Yale Review.

Books listed in chronological order.

• A Book of the Symphony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937)
• Music on Records (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938); revised as: Music on Records: a New Guide to the Music, the Performances, the Recordings (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945)
• Music for the Man who Enjoys 'Hamlet' (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1944)
• Conversations with Toscanini (New York: Doubleday, 1959)
• The Toscanini Musicians Knew (New York: Horizon Press, 1967); 2nd edition 1980 ISBN 9780818012044
• The New Listener's Companion and Record Guide (New York: Horizon Press, 1967); 2nd edition: 1968; 3rd edition: 1971 ISBN 9780818012075; 4th edition: 1974 ISBN 9780818012112; 5th edition 1978 ISBN 9780818012167)
• A Decade of Music (New York: Horizon Press, 1973 ISBN 9780818012105)
• Music Observed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); reissued as 35 Years of Music (New York: Horizon Press, 1974 ISBN 9780818012136)
• Music and Ballet, 1973-1983 (New York: Horizon Press, 1984 ISBN 9780818012266)
• Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, containing reprints of two titles: Conversations with Toscanini and The Toscanini musicians knew (New York: Da Capo, 1989) ISBN 9780306803567

• Arturo Toscanini, Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, ISBN 0-306-80356-9

• Tim Page, "B.H. Haggin, Critic, Essayist, and Author of Books On Music," New York Times (May 30, 1987). (Obituary)
• "Music: The Hamlet of B. H. Haggin" (Review of "Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet") (access available with subscription)