The Listener's Musical Companion

by B.H. Haggin

This book is intended primarily for those who, wishing to select a few out of the hundreds of works available on records, want to know which of these works are the greatest--in range and depth of communicated experience and emotion, in mastery of the resources of the medium; which works are enjoyable though of lesser stature; which to acquire first, which later, which not at all.

Genres: Music

520 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 1991

Reviews

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

B.H. Haggin's Music on Records, later revised as The Listener's Musical Companion, is one of the most famous introductory books on classical music, books intended to introduce laymen into appreciative listening to the classical repertory. The opening section introduces various musical forms and guides the reader through a number of pieces, then discusses major composers and their works. The second section discusses the chief recording artists, including conductors, instrumentalists and singers. It was first printed in 1956, but so succesful that B.H. Haggin updated it numerous times, and this edition -- the final one -- was finished after Haggin's death, by incorporating comments from his many articles and reviews to create a definitive version. At the time, Haggin was a greatly revered critic; the literary critic Marvin Mudrick named him one of the three greatest critics of all time (the others were Donald Tovey and Harold Rosenberg). What struck Mudrick was how right Haggin seemed to be, about everything -- how correct his opinions were. In 2023, his ideas do not hold up: one wonders if he even liked music much at all.

Haggin disliked most music ever written, and most composers, even major ones. After introducing Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn and (for some reason) Berlioz, the five composers who get his unqualified approval, Baggin proceeds to tear down nearly every other composer who ever dared put pen to paper, with only a short break to praise Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky. Bach, for instance, was a great technician, but apparently his music often lacks "expressive power"; most compositions of his are "mechanical exercises of [his] technical skill" (this is the opinion Mudrick singles out as particularly agreeable and correct). Many of his works are inferior to Haggin: the coffee and peasant cantatas are "quite dull", the cello suites are "not great or even enjoyable music", the sixth Brandenburg concerto is "completely boring" (the fifth is "only moderately interesting").

Yet Bach is one of the lucky ones! At least a significant body of his work is praiseworthy to Haggin. Nearly every other composer, especially those slightly more on the fringes of the repertoire, is harshly derided by Haggin. Brahms is essentailly a fraud to him, guilty of "cloying sweetness and archness", capable only of the "pretence of artistic creation": he "went through the motions of esthetic creation" only, creating in the end "noisy motions of saying something portentous that really said absolutely nothing". Time and time again, most composers apparently lack "expressiveness" -- their music doesn't say or mean anything to Haggin (what does that actually mean?). Everything but Schumann's lieder and select piano pieces is "inferior"; Listz's works you should "neglect", Bruckner's symphonies "reveal a yearning for monumental utterance without any capacity for the sustained thinking that must go into large-scale form", and result only in "attempts at momentous profundity by a mind capable only of dull commonplace"; "the slight, facile works of Saint-Saëns may be left unheard"; Rimsky-Korsakov's scherezade is "boring"; Richard Strauss works after Don Quixote are largely unworthy, showing a "deteriation in the quality ofhis musical ideas until eventually there were no ideas at all"; Mahler's later works (starting with the fifth symphony) are guilty of "diffuseness that is most of the time a mere filling in of the huge canvas with endless repetitions of empty gestures and lifeless mannerisms"; you shouldn't "waste any time on the compositions of Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and the others"; "worst of all, by far, is Shostakovich", whose "music was bad from the start and had in it the promise of continued badness; and the political pressures only made it worse"; Sibelius' seventh symphony is "a bogus mortar of stylistic mannerisms with which Sibelius pads out a few thematic fragments into a symphonic movement"; Elgar's music is "rhetorical and vulgar"; most of Vaughan Williams' works are "noisily unteresting"; Tippett's most famous work contains "nothing ... of the slightest musical interest".

Most performers do not fare better. Haggin worshipped Toscanini, and nobody could really be expected to top him. Only three conductors past Toscanini receive unqalified praise: Toscanini's student Cantelli, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Pierre Boulez. Some others have their moments. If you follow Haggin's recommendations, your musical world would be very, very small, and much to the detriment of your enjoyment. I am thankful that today we can buy the complete works of Locatelli and Paganini, the violin concertos of Viotti or Tartini, the orchestral works of Fasch and Malcolm Arnold and countless other composers who Haggin didn't deign to mention. It's certainly a better time to be a music lover, and Haggin's screeds, mere opinions often stated as facts, can be left in the dustbin of history.