B.H.Haggin

[Jane Simpson]

I've just acquired Haggin's Ballet Chronicle, and though I love the photographs, a quick flip through the text has already had me disagreeing with him fairly violently.

Please could someone postion him for me - how is he seen as a critic of Balanchine? and of other choreographers?

[Leigh Witchel]

Arlene Croce and he definitely had their differences. I may be misremembering, but is his main field of expertise music?

[Ari]

Yes, Haggin was a music critic in the days when mainstream publications assigned music critics to review ballet performances, if they reviewed them at all. Haggin was more interested in dance than most of the others, and made an effort to educate himself, but he could never be called a real ballet critic. He has to be read with that in mind, and also the fact that he was bristly and unafraid about venting his personal prejudices, pro and con. His main interest — unsurprisingly for a music critic — was Balanchine, although he wrote about pretty much everything that came his way.

[kfw]

Haggin wrote a wonderful book, now out of print, entitled Discovering Balanchine (New York Horizon Press, 1981) with full page black and white photos illustrating portions of Concerto Barroco, Apollo, Liebeslieder Walzer and other ballets. I can't even find his Music and Ballet: 1973-1983 listed on Amazon, but it includes reviews and short essays on Verdy and Martins.

[Dale]

I found both books very interesting, but by the time I read them I already had a clear idea of what I thought about Balanchine's works.

Jane, do you have Following Balanchine by Robert Garis? Haggin was a mentor to Garis. In the book, Garis writes of following Haggin's lead on ballets and dancers but then he breaks away and forms his own view. It's very interesting in that way (others too, but it puts Haggin in context).

[rg]

not much to add here:

BHH was definintely a music man who was a huge champion of balanchine's.

he liked saying things like: clive barnes would have you believe... and then proceed to say how wrong barnes' thinking was and how expert balanchine was.

by the time i was seeing him at the new york state theater he was quite an eccentric, folding his program something like a visor or blinders (aka blinkers) as a kind of shield to keep out all peripheral vision to allow for looking looking only at the stage, as if through a kind of tunnel.

i think i last saw him quite aged at a series of showings at the museum of broadcasting's balanchine t.v. festival.

[Paul Parish]

Jane, let me second Dale's recomendaition of Garis's book as a way to place haggin, whom I consider agreat critic, and one of the greats in an era of greats -- and hte lucky ones, who were responding to Balanchine's new works along with everybody else, when they were new --

He's certainly abrasive, and he actually prided himself on it, or at least, on his analytic astringency -- Garis may make it easier to see how that could have seemed heroic at the time -- which was God knows, a VERY different time from now, when a daily paper like the New York Herald Tribune had critics of the caliber of Edwin Denby and Virgil Thompson, people who actually TOLD you things.

Garis was MY teacher, so I'm biased -- though there's no law says you have to admire your teachers. I should say his example of honest engagement and response really inspired me. I admire his book "Following Balanchine" enormously -- it's an "Apologia pro vita sua," an intellectual autobiography concentrating on how encountering Balanchine became a process of self-discovery. A brave, generous testament; he's bearing witness, like a gospel singer, to his encounter with a kind of prophet. And Haggin was his first introduction to this kind of spiritual experience. If you take a look at the early chapters, you'll see how Denby and Haggin (SUCH different personalities) could both be heroes to a young intellectual such as Garis trying to find some sense of what was going on and what he himself ought to do.

I don't know that this will make you like Haggin. But I do think it's great that you want to read him and give him a chance. It might be useful, in thinking about what value it may have had for Haggin to be so exacting -- why did he have to come up with expressoins like "the ballerina operation" to analyze how differently Verdy moves from the rest of us -- to consider the general gaseousness of standard American discourse in the US in hte 50s. I also wonder how much the contentiousness and shrillness came from the energies of gay intellectuals whose energy for SCRUTINIZING ballet was partly a sign of the times -- "Scrutiny" was the name of an important literary journal of that era -- and also tempting for closeted gays, for whom more open, "honest" comment might have left them open not only to charges of naivete but also to having their emotions legible enough that their homosexuality might be detectable. (I THINK Haggin was gay, but i can't remember why I assume that.)

[Jane Simpson]

Thankyou all for the guidance - I've just brought the Garis book home from the library and will read that first.

[dirac]

Jane, I would be interested to hear what you thought of Haggin and Garis.

I love Garis' book. Paul's description of it as an "intellectual autobiography" is apposite. Some things might seem a tad eccentric to the non-balletomane -- a friend of mine raised an eyebrow at Garis' talk of "collaborating" with Balanchine and of Garis not appreciating a work sufficiently because he hadn't "worked on it" with Balanchine. Beautiful pictures, too.

Haggin took some getting used to for me. I first came across his work in a book called Music for One Who Know Hamlet and I thought his dance criticism was unduly harsh and repetitive, at first.

[Paul Parish]

me too, Jane --

DOn't meanto put you on hte spot, but I've been wondering how you're coming t terms with those two...

In a way they're BOTH so American.

I''ve had reason lately to be thinking of my days at Oxford, and hte kinds of things "the English" didn't need to have pointed out or tacked down, an how in some ways Americans need to justify their feelings by pointing out WHAT exactly made me feel that way, ways the English seemed ot feel were unnecessarily contentious and maybe got in the way...... It civilized me, I think, but I still can feel horribly insecure venturing an opinion I wouldn't know how to back up.

You may never warm up to them. And there may be no need. But I do think it's necessary for Americans.

[Jane Simpson]

Oh dear. I had the Garis out of the library for 2 months - renewed it twice, took it everywhere with me - but never got beyond the first chapter. And the Haggin is still on my things-to-read pile. I'd better have another, more serious try...

[dirac]

When I first picked up Following Balanchine, I skipped around rather than beginning at the beginning. That’s not a very good way to treat a book as a rule, but I found it helped me in this case.

[cobweb]

I'm reviving this thread from many years ago, as I have just read Robert Garis' Following Balanchine. It is a first-person account of someone who followed Balanchine's career from the early days, way before City Ballet was even a possibility. He gives a highly detailed, highly personal, year-by-year, ballet-by-ballet, dancer-by-dancer account of following Balanchine from the mid-40s till after Balanchine's death. There is a lot of fascinating speculation on what Balanchine might be thinking as he created particular works, what Balanchine thought about the music he was using and how this attitude was expressed in the choreography (particularly interesting in the case of Concerto Barocco), why certain dancers were cast at particular times and not others, why Balanchine's infatuation with Suzanne Farrell nearly sank the company, and more -- much MUCH more. Garis definitely gets into the weeds about his own personal reactions -- do we really need to know that he was so excited by the premiere of Don Quixote that he couldn't sleep that night and thus he, rather than the friends with whom he stayed in New York, went out at 6:00am the next morning for bagels? I found these personal tidbits (and there are lots of them) charming, but my partner was bored to tears by some of the passages I read.

I don't have the long history with NYCB that some on this board do, and I've tried to get more informed about Balanchine history and the repertory. This book, in following along chronologically as Balanchine's career developed, was greatly helpful with that. If you can get through the extreme introspection of Garis' writing, it is fascinating and informative. Also, I totally can't recall where I heard about this book. At the start of the NYCB 75th anniversary season I browsed my bookshelves for background reading, and saw Following Balanchine. Obviously I bought it at some point but have absolutely no recollection of this and would swear I never heard of him before. Possibly I read about it here and forgot?? Anyway, now I have ordered Haggin's Discovering Balanchine. Will report back once I get that!

[Drew]

Thanks @cobweb for posting your thoughts. I've been curious about Garis's book but am so far behind on ballet-related reading I have given up on starting or even purchasing anything new.  (The Harss Ratmansky bio is staring at me from my dining room table and my barely begun kindle copy of Bentley's Serenade haunts me from my computer screen--etc. etc.)

[cobweb]

Hi @Drew! If you ever get to reading Robert Garis, I would love to hear your thoughts. Toni Bentley's Serenade is pretty easy reading, and fun too!

[vipa]

3 hours ago, cobweb said:

I'm reviving this thread from many years ago, as I have just read Robert Garis' Following Balanchine. It is a first-person account of someone who followed Balanchine's career from the early days, way before City Ballet was even a possibility. He gives a highly detailed, highly personal, year-by-year, ballet-by-ballet, dancer-by-dancer account of following Balanchine from the mid-40s till after Balanchine's death. There is a lot of fascinating speculation on what Balanchine might be thinking as he created particular works, what Balanchine thought about the music he was using and how this attitude was expressed in the choreography (particularly interesting in the case of Concerto Barocco), why certain dancers were cast at particular times and not others, why Balanchine's infatuation with Suzanne Farrell nearly sank the company, and more -- much MUCH more. Garis definitely gets into the weeds about his own personal reactions -- do we really need to know that he was so excited by the premiere of Don Quixote that he couldn't sleep that night and thus he, rather than the friends with whom he stayed in New York, went out at 6:00am the next morning for bagels? I found these personal tidbits (and there are lots of them) charming, but my partner was bored to tears by some of the passages I read.

I don't have the long history with NYCB that some on this board do, and I've tried to get more informed about Balanchine history and the repertory. This book, in following along chronologically as Balanchine's career developed, was greatly helpful with that. If you can get through the extreme introspection of Garis' writing, it is fascinating and informative. Also, I totally can't recall where I heard about this book. At the start of the NYCB 75th anniversary season I browsed my bookshelves for background reading, and saw Following Balanchine. Obviously I bought it at some point but have absolutely no recollection of this and would swear I never heard of him before. Possibly I read about it here and forgot?? Anyway, now I have ordered Haggin's Discovering Balanchine. Will report back once I get that!

I guess I missed this and am not familiar with this book. I'm sure I'll get to it but, I have to admit, after plowing thorough the Homan's bio I'm maxed out on reading thoughts/opinions/reports on Balanchine for the time being. It does sound like a unique perspective, though.

[dirac]

Thank you cobweb, I love it when people bring back old threads. "Following Balanchine" is one of my favorite ballet books although I haven't taken it off the shelf in a long time. I remember especially Garis's perceptive observations on the Balanchine-Stravinsky relationship, his wonderful recall about the ballets he saw, and his candor about his responses to a given dancer or ballet at the time, whether or not that judgment survived the test of time very well.

As I remember, he loved Farrell from the get-go and mourned her departure from the company, regardless of the backstage turbulence. I thought the book also conveyed very well why what Garis calls "the Balanchine Enterprise" was so important to artists, poets, and (some) of the intelligentsia at the time.

Haggin is quite different, so I will be interested to read your impressions when you get the book.

 

[cobweb]

Both the Haggin and the Garis books were interesting to me, although they are very different kinds of books. I had never heard of either of these two men before, until I saw Garis' book on my bookshelf (no recollection of when I bought this, although obviously I did at some point! What is happening to my mind??). Haggin was a longtime music critic, including 20 years at The Nation. Garis was maybe a generation younger, but they became close friends until they had a tumultuous falling out that is described in Garis' book. Haggin's book, Discovering Balanchine, came well before Garis' book, Following Balanchine, and they had fallen out by the time Garis wrote his book. But the fact that Garis gave his book such a similar title to Haggin's suggests an enduring feeling, or maybe sense of competition.

Anyway, as my post above details, I found Following Balanchine to be a fascinating chronicle of Balanchine's work and more broadly, of the NYC arts world in the 1940s through 80s. Haggin's book, Discovering Balanchine, is mostly a series of black-and-white Martha Swope photos. The idea seems to be, in a pre-YouTube, pre-video era, to present iconic moments (example, "swimming lesson" from Apollo) from Balanchine's ballets through photos. They are beautiful photos; many captivated me but I will mention one, a scintillating Lourdes Lopez in Divertimento No. 15. Even with video of these ballets now more readily available, to have key moments distilled and presented so clearly, makes an impact. The photos are bookended by two short essays, one of Haggin's personal encounters with Balanchine, and another of his experience of particular ballets. Both books are worthy additions to a dance library.