Prince Uncharming

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 out of their spell.

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 authorities. Puccini and Ravel he dismisses as perpetrators of "slick trash."

Quirky Evaluations. His evaluation of virtuoso performers is no less quirky. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz's "unvarying, mannered manipulation of melodic phrase [with] infinite gradations of tone is his one way of operating with every composer." On the other hand, Pianist Van Cliburn, who has taken some critical lumps in recent years, displays "disciplined mastery" and an "unfailing sense for note-to-note continuity of tone, tension and outline."

"I don't 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.

Scornful Blasts. Along the way, he has blasted the work of most of his colleagues, including such contemporary reviewers as the New York Times's Harold Schonberg ("vulgarity and offensiveness"), and The New Yorker's Winthrop Sargeant ("deficiencies of critical perception, judgment and taste"). Recently, he wrote scornfully that Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing is "a bully" whose "monstrosities" prove him to be "not only without understanding of the special requirements of opera but without taste."

Haggin's ungracious invective and cranky imperiousness are offset--as in his new volume--by the clarity, detail and provocativeness of his excursions into musical structure and development. "I am bound to report what I hear," he writes, "and the reader then is free to find what I say to be true or not true for him." In that spirit, Haggin rarely fails to fulfill a basic function of criticism. He sends the reader--delighted, perplexed or steaming mad--back to the music.

* The New Listener's Companion and Record Guide (Horizon; $7.50).

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