BOOKS
473
other books will be led to them by
Music Observed.
There is distinguished
intelligence at work on every page and the writing throughout is superb:
taut but informal, unfailingly clear and straightforward, totally free of
pretense and posturing. Revision and selection have also freed it of
virtually every trace of what someone once perceptively called Haggin's
"oral-formulaic manner," a jargonistic rigidity that sometimes mars his
regular columns.
At only a very few points did I feel puzzled or dissatisfied. Haggin
says he is aware of "tremendous powers" operating in Schonberg's String
Trio and "impressive powers" in Stravinsky's
Agon,
yet he likes neither
piece. I wish he had described those "powers" more fully, shown how
their operation differs (if it does) from "the real, active, purposeful
operation of the composer's mind," and explained more clearly why their
operation gave him no pleasure. Also, there are two references to Mahler
that bothered me, one to his "amorphously sprawling musical structures"
whicil "[Bruno] W.alter tightens and makes coherent," the other to
Walter's "skillful performance" which "conceals the [Second Symphony's]
discontinuities with a contrived coherence." I should like to know if the
relation of performance to work here is parallel to the one Haggin finds
in Szigeti's performances of Bach's Partitas, performances in which he
hears "only the expressive eloquence of Szigeti's playing, implying an
expressiveness in the music that is not really there."
If
it is not, I fail
to see why Walter's performances are not just good performances that
adequately convey the coherence of Mahler's music ; if it is, then the
implied judgment of Mahler seems inexplicably harsher than Haggin's
usual view of him as a long-winded composer whose "mind always
working ... in unexpected, individual, original and fascinating ways"
offsets his long-windedness. But these are small matters and there was
only one piece that failed as a whole for me, a review of Samuel Antek's
This Was Toscanini
in which Haggin allows his sense of the injustices
done Toscanini to divert him from describing Antek's remarkable book
adequately and to lead him to use it primarily as evidence that at least
Toscanini's orchestra did not betray him.
My only serious objection to Haggin's job of selection is that he
didn't reprint any of the very interesting theoretical pieces he did for
the
Nation
in the mid-twenties. In those days Muck and Mengelberg
were the conductors who mattered, and Toscanini (along with Stokow–
ski! ) was symptomatic of a new and regrettable "emotional trend in
performance": "Formerly changes in tempo and color revealed pattern
'and structure, now they convey emotions; and as against Mr. Mengel–
berg's architectonics of form we now have Mr. Toscanini's architectonics
