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Seiji Ozawa, the lively Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm in the 1960s and ’70s and was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002, died Feb. 6 in Tokyo. He was 88 years old.
The cause was heart failure, said a spokeswoman for the Seiji Ozawa International Academy in Switzerland, which announced his death in a press release.
Mr. Ozawa had recently experienced health problems. He never fully recovered from surgery for esophageal cancer in early 2010, nor from back problems that worsened during his recovery. He was also hospitalized with heart valve disease in later years.
Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the world of classical music over the past half century: a huge influx of East Asian musicians to the West, which in turn has helped spread the gospel of Western classical music. in Corea. , Japan and China.
For much of that time, a widespread belief even among knowledgeable critics held that, while highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical skill in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its performance needs or a deep sense of its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa overcame this prejudice thanks to his enormous personality, his meticulous musicianship and his hard work.
With his mop of black hair, boyish demeanor and seemingly boundless energy, Mr. Ozawa captured the popular imagination from the beginning.
He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named musical director of the Boston Symphony. He achieved many successes over the years, proving especially adept at large, complex works that many others found difficult to handle.
He toured extensively and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But many thought his 29-year tenure was too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s, or the subscribers’.
Although relatively inexperienced in opera, he left it in 2002 to become musical director of the august Vienna State Operawhere she remained until 2010. The rest of her life was consumed primarily by health problems and dreams of a grand return to the concert stage, which she was never able to achieve.
Seiji Ozawa was born to Japanese parents in Japanese-occupied Shenyang, China, on September 1, 1935. (The family returned to Japan in 1944.) He studied piano as a child, but abandoned thoughts of a piano career when he broke two fingers playing rugby. He studied conducting under Hideo Saitothe prominent professor of Western music in Japan, at the Toho Music School in Tokyo.
In 1959 he traveled to Europe on a cargo ship, bringing a motorcycle and a guitar. He won a competition for conductors in Besançon, France, that year, and one of the judges, Charles Munch, then music director of the Boston Symphony, invited him to study at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, the summer home of the orchestra. in western Massachusetts.
After winning the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding conducting students there, he returned to Europe. He studied with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin and sparked the interest of Leonard Bernstein, who appointed him assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1961.
Two years later, still not well known, appeared on the television show “What’s My Line?” in which celebrity panelists had to guess their occupation based on yes or no answers. It took them a while. But his rise had already begun.
In 1964, he became artistic director of the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, Bernstein recommended him to Walter Homburger, general director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who was looking for a music director to replace Walter Susskind. Mr. Ozawa took the job and his career took off.
He left both positions in 1969 and was music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1970 to 1976. From 1970 to 1973, he was also artistic director of the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, sharing the position with composer Gunther Schuller and solidifying his partnership with the Boston Symphony.
In addition to conducting Boston Symphony concerts, Mr. Ozawa’s relationship with Tanglewood over the years was somewhat halting but occasionally eventful. In 1994, the orchestra built a magnificent 1,180-seat auditorium on campus. Norio Ohga, president of Sony Corporation, donated $2 million of the nearly $10 million he cost on the condition that the structure be named Seiji Ozawa Hall.
Storm clouds gathered a few years later, when Mr. Ozawa, after years of relative inactivity at Tanglewood Music Center, as the school was now called, asserted his prerogatives as music director of the orchestra.
Complaining about a decline in the quality of the conducting program and an underrepresentation of orchestra members on the faculty, he fired a key administrator in 1996. The following year, prominent faculty members, including pianists Leon Fleisher, artistic director of the center, and Gilbert Kalish, the president of its faculty, left in protest, citing Mr. Ozawa’s lack of a clear vision.
Mr. Ozawa remained active in Japan during his tenure in Boston. He became honorary artistic director of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (now New Japan Philharmonic) in 1980. Four years later, he helped found the Saito Kinen Orchestra, a memorial to the beloved mentor of his youth. This spawned the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto in 1992; The event was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in 2015.
Ozawa eventually left the Boston Symphony in 2002. As Music Director Laureate, he returned to Boston for two concerts at Symphony Hall in 2008.
He last performed at Tanglewood in 2006. He canceled a scheduled return in 2010 for health reasons and had to cancel again in 2016, because he lacked the physical strength to return to Japan after briefly conducting in Europe.
Ozawa’s shift to opera was a surprise, given his limited experience. He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1992, conducting Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” and returned only once, in 2008, in the same opera.
At the Vienna State Opera he was able to fill many gaps left by a career spent almost exclusively in concert halls. But he tended to eschew standard repertoire in favor of marginal ones, as in his first big hit: a jazzy, Weimar-era new production of Ernst Krenek’s “Jonny spielt auf” in 2003.
He was also able to conduct and tour with the Vienna Philharmonic, an elite autonomous contingent of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. He conducted the orchestra in three concerts at Carnegie Hall in 2004.
Ozawa was to make a triumphant return to Carnegie in the 2010-11 season. But the event, although in some ways the culmination of his career, had to be severely restricted.
In December 2010 he traveled to New York hoping to conduct the Saito Kinen Orchestra in three programs at Carnegie as part of the city’s JapanNYC festival. But, having suffered throughout the year from attacks of sciatica, he had to reduce his efforts in each of the first two concerts to a single major work. He retained enough of his youthful vigor to finish with a strong effort, conducting Britten’s lengthy and deeply moving “War Requiem.”
As artistic director of JapanNYC, he was scheduled to return to Carnegie in April 2011 to conduct concerts by Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-juku, a Japanese youth orchestra. But he had to cancel this and most subsequent engagements.
Mr. Ozawa made a modest international return in April 2016, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at the Berlin Philharmonic and the orchestra of Switzerland’s Seiji Ozawa International Academy in Paris.
In the later years of his life, Mr. Ozawa came to recognize the wisdom that comes from years of making music.
“The special flavor of a musician comes with age,” he said in “Absolutely on Music,” a 2016 book about conversations between Ozawa and novelist Haruki Murakami. “His playing at that stage may have more interesting qualities than at the height of his career.”