The maestro who conducted from memory

Seiji Ozawa hauled the hidebound world of classical music into a new era. The first Asian superstar conductor, he burst onto the scene as a rebel at a time when many critics patronizingly assumed that non-Westerners could never truly excel on the podium. In the early 1970s, when he took the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—the ensemble he would lead for nearly three decades—the boyishly charismatic maestro shunned tuxedos in favor of turtlenecks, tunics, and love beads. Musically, though, Ozawa kept himself rooted in tradition, delivering electrifying interpretations of works by Romantic composers such as Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, and Mahler. Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer called his work “calligraphy in motion,” and said he “displayed the greatest physical gift for conducting of anyone in his generation.”

Born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Ozawa was the son of a dentist whose pacifism led to the family’s deportation to mainland Japan. His mother was a Christian, and he “vividly recalled being drawn to music” in church, said The Washington Post. While he had hoped to become a classical pianist, he switched to conducting in his teens after breaking several fingers playing rugby. In 1959, he hopped a freighter to Europe and won a young conductors’ competition. After studying at the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center, he was mentored by Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. Ozawa’s

“rise to international prominence was meteoric,” said The Boston Globe. Often conducting from memory, the score unopened before him, he did stints as music director for orchestras in San Francisco and Toronto, conducted at La Scala and the Paris Opera

House, recorded all the symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms, among others, and even conducted the Muppets on public television.

Yet Ozawa was not universally beloved, said

The Telegraph (U.K.). In the mid-1990s, his staff changes at the Boston Symphony triggered an internal revolt, and many felt he had “overstayed his welcome.” In 2002, he left to direct the Vienna State Opera. Conducting, he said in 1999, only worked as a collaboration between the conductor and the musicians. “They show what they think. I show what I think,” he said. “It mixes, and then comes out one thing. An audience hears one thing, but inside it’s many different things.”