Music and ballet 1973-1983

National Review, April 5, 1985 by Terry Teachout

FORTY YEARS AGO, The Nation had the best back-of-the-book section in the magazine business. James Agee's vivid movie reviews appeared regularly; Diana Trilling was making a well-deserved name for herself with her "Fiction in Review" column; and musical events were covered by B. H. Haggin, a fearless, tough-minded critic whose admirers included Dwight Macdonald, Stark Young, Randall Jarrell, and Arturo Toscanini.

The Nation has long since hardened into a sclerotic house organ for the Friends of Alger Hiss, but B. H. Haggin, 84 years old and as ferociously independent as ever, continues to chronicle the musical scene, now for The Yale Review. In his latest book, Music and Ballet 1973-1983, Haggin zeroes in on an assortment of familiar targets: atonal music, Glenn Gould's "perverse" approach to Mozart, the latest fashions in opera production. Even his index is abrasive. ("Rockwell: rubbish on Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic, 40.") Still, it is Haggin's warm, intensely judicious praise--of Balanchine, Toscanini, Van Cliburn--that stays with the reader longest. Like John Simon, he has an unerring eye for the first-rate. (Who would have expected the man Samuel Lipman once compared to F. R. Leavis to appreciate the soft-shoe antics of Mikhail Baryshnikov in Push Comes to Shove?) And as for Haggin's so-called "narrowness," one might well quote his own cogent explanation of why Toscanini stopped conducting modern music: "He thought it reasonable that what he had done in his youth should now be left to his young contemporaries, who had an understanding and feeling for the new music that he didn't have, while he increased his insight into the great music of the past." B. H. Haggin has b een increasing his insight into the great music of the past since 1929. We're lucky to have him around.