The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Seiji Ozawa
Charismatic conductor and Leonard Bernstein protégé who blazed a Japanese trail in classical music
SEIJI OZAWA, who has died aged 88, was one of the few Japanese musicians to make a significant mark in the Western classical music tradition. He crossed the East-West divide with remarkable ease, creating some mesmerising music during a tenure of almost three decades with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
He was also the figurehead of classical music in an increasingly westernised Japan, suggesting to his compatriots that embracing European culture need not diminish their own traditions. Although other Asian artists became well known in Western concert halls – Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Mitsuko Uchida (piano) and Midori (violin) among them – Ozawa was their unelected leader, blazing a trail through Europe and America.
The appointment in Massachusetts of a Japanese maestro – at a time when he already held a similar appointment in San Francisco – coincided with a rising fascination within the US for all things Oriental and a growing anti-Vietnam War feeling. Ozawa, the Boston Red Sox fan, played to the gallery, wearing a turtleneck sweater instead of a dinner jacket on the podium and at first sporting a Beatles-style fringe.
After the ageing European stars who had dominated North American music for so many decades, Ozawa was explosive – startling to some, energising to others. He re-invigorated orchestras and inspired audiences with performances that crackled with electricity.
However, he also came to epitomise the peripatetic, rootless and bi-coastal maestro, who spent as much time in airport lounges as in concert halls, flying in to rehearse, conduct and collect his pay cheque, rather than embedding himself within a community. There were some who questioned if, beneath the showmanship, there was in fact much of any substance.
He was equally well-known in Europe, where his charismatic figure cut a swathe through the concert halls of London and Berlin. Even his presence in an audience could cause a stir among the orchestra. The paucity of Japanese representatives among Western musicians meant that he was often associated with his compatriot, the composer Toru Takemitsu, the two of them making a significant impact in London in the Japanese Festival of 1991.
Back in Japan he conducted five symphonies for the Winter Olympics at Nagano in 1998, including directing choirs on five continents simultaneously (by satellite) in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
On the platform he danced lightly as he conducted, leaning back and jabbing the baton in the air. As he aged his hair seemed to grow ever shaggier and his demeanour ever more laidback, while his English remained only just passable for a television interview.
His Japanese origins were, he claimed, a benefit rather than a hindrance in tackling Western classical music. “It’s very hard for a French conductor to get into the German tradition,” he once said. “But we Japanese can get good musical traditions from all countries because we have none of our own.”
Seiji Ozawa was born on September 1 1935 in China, in Hoten, Manchuria, which at the time was under Japanese occupation. His father was a dentist who is said to have once pulled a piano in a wagon 25 miles so that his son could have an instrument to play.
His mother brought up the family as Christians and an elder brother became a church organist.
By the age of seven, and now living in Japan, his interest had turned to Western music. He came under the influence of
Hideo Saito, a German-trained musician related to his mother, who was almost single-handedly responsible for expanding the influence of Western music in occupied post-war Japan. In his book The Maestro
Myth the commentator Norman Lebrecht relates how the young Seiji, unable to afford his teacher’s fees, “spent seven Jacobean years as a servant in Saito’s house”.
At 16 he entered the Toho School in Tokyo in the hope of becoming a pianist, but that ambition was dashed when he broke both his index fingers on the rugby pitch. Instead he turned his attention to conducting. His first introduction to the Boston players came during their post-war tour of Japan in his student days. Yet, despite Saito and his influence, Ozawa had never heard a live opera performance or a Mahler symphony until he was 23.
In 1959 in Europe – which he had reached by freighter – he supported himself working as a motorcycle sales rep for a Japanese company. Soon he spotted an advertisement for a conducting competition in Besançon: he roared into the French town on a Japanese motorcycle, entered the competition and won – endearing himself in the process to the venerable maestro
Charles Munch, who was on the jury.
Before long – and still with virtually no English – he visited Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where he was the recipient of a Koussevitzky Award. Soon he was back in Europe studying with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin.
It was there that Leonard Bernstein saw him and invited the young conductor to be his assistant at the New York Philharmonic, a post he held from 1961 to 1965 – during which time he appeared on the US TV show
What’s My Line? He also served as artistic director of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago.
Ozawa was musical director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-69), with whom he had his first real taste of international touring. However, his big US break came when Dmitri Shostakovich, who had been scheduled to conduct in San Francisco, fell victim to Cold War politics and the West Coast orchestra urgently needed a substitute.
The Californians appointed him music director in 1970, but his goal was always Boston and the mighty legacy of Serge Koussevitzky, the orchestra’s director from 1924 to 1949. He was appointed musical director there in 1973 but, controversially, chose not to relinquish his West Coast appointment for another three years, leading to accusations on both coasts of absenteeism.
Although there were many good times in Boston – not least the orchestra’s centenary world tour in 1981 and the construction of the Seiji Ozawa Concert Hall at Tanglewood in 1994 – when the novelty of both maestro and turtlenecks faded, Ozawa dug his heels in and refused to move on, determined to beat Koussevitzky as the orchestra’s longest-serving conductor.
A group of BSO players published a circular in which they expressed open hostility. Commenting on his frequent insistence that the relationship between a conductor and his orchestra was like a marriage, they argued that “marriages do not all end in death… some marriages linger on monotonously, with a lack of mutual regard, respect, and stimulation.”
Professional critics also declared that he had outstayed his welcome. Richard Dyer, highly regarded critic of The Boston Globe, was among those who declared that Ozawa had failed to fulfil his youthful promise.
He eventually did move on, however, after 28 years. In 2002 he found himself in Europe, where he followed in the footsteps of von Karajan by becoming principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera (he started the year by conducting the traditional New Year’s Day concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, the recording of which became Japan’s fastest-selling classical record). It was in the Austrian capital that he conducted Mstislav Rostropovich’s last cello performance, a premiere of a new work by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
On the back of the American hype, Ozawa’s eagerly awaited London debut was with the LSO in 1965 in a programme of Beethoven, Berlioz and Mozart that left the critics cautious but welcoming: he “justified expectations up to a point”, noted The Times.
He became a frequent visitor to Britain, notably with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival during John Drummond’s tenure (their 1979 concert was described as having “moved ideas about orchestral interpretation into a new league”). The relationship continued when Drummond moved to the Proms, including a memorable evening with Jessye Norman at the Royal Albert Hall in 1984.
Meanwhile, he was first seen conducting at Covent Garden in Eugene Onegin in 1974, and was a frequent guest conductor with the Philharmonia in the 1980s. He also conducted Kiri Te Kanawa’s first Tosca, in
Paris in 1982.
Ozawa cancelled all his engagements in 2010 after doctors diagnosed oesophageal cancer. And no sooner had he undergone a successful operation than he was afflicted with chronic sciatica, making it all but impossible for him to spend more than five minutes on the podium.
Despite his travels, Ozawa maintained his links with Japan. In 1984, in memory of his teacher, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which visited the Proms in 1990, and the Saito Kinen Festival in the “Japanese Alps” at Matsumoto, modelled on Tanglewood. With the novelist Haruki Murakami he conducted a series of six conversations about classical music that resulted in the 2016 book Absolutely on Music.
His first marriage was to the pianist Kyoko Edo. He maintained a home in Tokyo with his second wife Vera Ilyan and their daughter and son.
Seiji Ozawa, born September 1 1935, died February 6 2024