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WILLIAM YOUNGREN
of emotions." And in contrast to his later, commonsense view of music
as a medium of communication, Haggin believed then that music
uses sounds "not to convey intellectual meanings, or emotional mean–
ings, but to convey what must be called a purely musical signif–
icance, a significance
sui generis
. . . primarily music expresses only
itself." Yet in practice this extremely austere theory seems only to have
implied that in order to be fully intelligible, any "mere verbal descrip–
tion" of music must be supplemented by "direct, comprehending-which
means educated-experience" of the music itself. I would guess that the
central development in Haggin's theoretical views-which would have
emerged much more clearly in
Music Observed
if the best of these early
pieces had been included-was the realization that you could insist on
the necessity of direct experience without committing yourself to
sui
generis
musical meanings, and that structure could (and perhaps must)
be articulated by direct expressive force-a realization most importantly
embodied in a growing appreciation of Toscanini as the performer who
above all other·s revealed both "structure and expressive significance,"
as Haggin puts it in his introduction.
And it's clear that Toscanini's conducting had personal as well as
musical significance. I am not the first reviewer of this collection to
point out that the principal virtue Haggin praises in Toscanini, "an
economy that was a form of honesty ... and gave the operation a moral
quality," is also the principal virtue of Haggin's own thought and writing.
It is this, as well as his intelligence, that makes him the only music
critic since Shaw who yields as much profit and excitement as the best
modern literary critics, and one of the very few men of our generation
who meCtt the all but impossibly high standard D. H. Lawrence set when
he wrote: "A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually
capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest."
William Youngren
