As a critic, Haggin showed little patience for mediocre music, musicians or fellow critics. He criticized RCA Victor for issuing badly engineered or mastered recordings of Toscanini and "enhancing" them with echo-chamber effects, treble-peaking and/or pseudo-stereo sound. (Partly because of Haggin's complaints, later editions of those recordings did without such interventions.) In addition, Haggin was strongly critical of the interpretive style of Romantically inclined conductors who often deviated from the printed score like Wilhelm Furtwängler, who at the time was considered Toscanini's polar opposite and greatest rival. Nor was he loath to make value judgments about some later Romantic (like Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss) and many leading twentieth-century composers and works; such outspokenness offended some of his readers, and endeared him to others. Even Toscanini's own repertoire choices were by no means always safe from Haggin's censure. For instance, when Toscanini gave the American premiere of Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony in 1942 (he described this symphony as epitomizing the "suffering of the Russian people" at the hands of the German invaders), Haggin dissented, declaring the piece to be "an inflated monstrosity of straining, portentous banality." Also Haggin made some of his most passionate pronouncements from the standpoint of "meta-criticism," sometimes spending more column inches in criticizing his fellow critics' opinions than in expressing his own sentiments on the music or performers in question.