Bernard H. Haggin (December 29, 1900 - May 28, 1987), better known as B.H. Haggin, was an American music critic.
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A lifelong inhabitant of New York City, he graduated from Juilliard School in 1920, where he studied piano.He published his first article in 1923. His career as a journalist commenced shortly thereafter as a contributor to The New Republic.
From 1936 to 1957 he was the music critic of The Nation. He was music critic of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1934 to 1937. From 1946 to 1949, he wrote a column about music on the radio for The New York Herald Tribune.
Haggin was a staunch but not entirely uncritical admirer of the conductor Arturo Toscanini, whom he befriended. He was the first major American critic to recognize choreographer George Balanchine. In the 1930s Haggin launched the career of the future record producer, John Hammond, hiring him as a reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Haggin wrote twelve books on music and two on ballet. He was the author of the first general guide to recorded classical music Music on Records (1938), later expanded as The Listener's Musical Companion (1956), which Haggin regularly updated in new editions until 1978. Haggin's best-known titles are about Toscanini: Conversations with Toscanini (1959), a personal reminiscence, and the closest that anyone has ever published to a series of interviews with the publicity-shy Toscanini, and The Toscanini Musicians Knew (1967), a series of interviews with musicians who played in orchestras or sang with the Italian conductor. The two volumes were republished in 1989 as Arturo Toscanini, Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro. Haggin was one of the few critics who became a personal friend of the conductor, and was therefore allowed unprecedented access to him.
Haggin's books on Toscanini were deliberately written as a corrective to what Haggin felt were misinformed opinions and misrepresented facts about Toscanini which were beginning to circulate at that time.
As a critic, Haggin was trenchant, imperious, and meticulous, having little patience for mediocre music, musicians, or fellow critics. He engendered enmity by criticizing RCA Victor for issuing badly-recorded or badly-mixed recordings of Toscanini and "enhancing" them with added resonance and artificial stereo sound. He was strongly critical of the interpretive style of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who at the time was considered Toscanini's polar opposite and greatest rival. He was not ashamed to make value judgments about composers and works that offended some readers and endeared him to others. He wrote of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony that it was "an inflated monstrosity of straining, portentous banality." He also made some of his most passionate judgements in a position of "meta-criticism," sometimes spending more column inches in criticizing his fellow critics' opinions than in making his own.
In his later years he wrote for The Hudson Review, The New Republic, Musical America and The Yale Review.