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Mr. Ozawa, who underwent treatment for esophageal cancer in 2010, had been in poor health for years. He was expected to conduct the Boston Symphony in July 2016, but he withdrew in May due to what was described as a “lack of physical strength.”
It was a melancholy coda for a man who had arrived in Boston in the early 1970s as a long-haired, fashionably dressed teacher who exuded youthful energy. It seemed a stark contrast to the middle-aged, tuxedo-clad northern Europeans who had long dominated the classical music podium.
It was the fall of the counterculture, Boston was booming, and Ozawa seemed to feel at home in the most collegial of college towns, freshly awakened from a long period in which he was considered staid and reserved. His studiously modern, turtle-necked, love-beaded image (cleverly promoted by the BSO’s public relations department) made him seem like a new kind of music director for a new era.
Suddenly, Mr. Ozawa was everywhere: conducting the OST as well as the Muppet Animal Orchestra on public television, gracing magazine covers, making appearances at Red Sox games as a high-profile ticket holder . He won two Emmy Awards for his television directing and was the subject of a documentary co-directed by the Maysles brothers.
Ozawa joined a small group of classical musicians, among them Beverly Sills, Leonard Bernstein and Luciano Pavarotti, who were known not only to concert audiences but also to a vast general public.
Despite the avalanche of publicity, it was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Ozawa was a serious, thoughtful and prodigiously talented musician. He dazzled orchestras and audiences with what Pulitzer Prize-winning composer León Kirchner once called “the aroma, the sense, the sensuality of an extraordinary person.” He attracted world-class mentors such as Bernstein of the New York Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Richard Dyer, the Boston Globe’s longtime music critic, wrote in 2002 that Ozawa “displayed the greatest physical gift for conducting of any person of his generation, and a range and precision of musical memory that struck awe and envy into hearts.” of most musicians. “Who found it?”
In later years, Dyer added, he remained “beautiful to look at and unique in the amount of information and focused emotions he can communicate through gaze, attitude and gestures. “Ozawa is calligraphy in motion, precise and evocative.”
Ozawa had an almost unparalleled gift for uniting enormous orchestras and choirs into long, complex and densely packed works, such as Hector Berlioz’s “Damnation de Faust”, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder”, Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss’s “War Requiem”. . opera “Elektra”, which he presented in concert form with the BSO.
He directed the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s four-and-a-half-hour opera “Saint François d’Assise” (1983) at the Paris Opera; The score required a 150-person orchestra and included 41 parts for percussion only.
He recorded all of these works, as well as the complete symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Prokofiev and hundreds of other pieces. Most of his albums were recorded with the BSO, but he also recorded with prominent orchestras such as Vienna and Tokyo.
But his tenure in Boston (29 years, the longest musical directorship in the orchestra’s history) is likely his greatest legacy. It was a legacy that became the subject of heated debate as the years passed. As his duties grew, many critics expressed dismay that Ozawa, once so stimulating, increasingly seemed to indulge in superficial and often artistically thoughtless performances. Morale plummeted among the musicians.
He retained devoted admirers and protectors who continued to bestow upon him laurels, and he received the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors, which cited him as “one of the great figures in the world of classical music today.” But there was relief when James Levine, the former music director of the Metropolitan Opera, took over Mr. Ozawa’s duties at the BSO.
At first, it seemed that Levine had begun to revitalize the BSO before his health problems interfered with his demanding schedule and he began canceling many of his appearances. Levine left in 2011 in what was presented as a “mutual decision.”
Seiji Ozawa, the third of four brothers with a Buddhist father and Christian mother, was born on September 1, 1935 in Mukden (now Shenyang), Manchuria, during the Japanese occupation of that region of China.
His father was there as a dentist for a railway company, but his growing sympathy for the plight of the Chinese and his involvement with a pacifist organization caused conflict. The Ozawas were soon deported to the Japanese mainland.
His family settled in Tachikawa, where there was a military air base on the outskirts of Tokyo. His father was denied a license to practice and scraped by as a rice farmer. Mr. Ozawa vividly recalled being drawn to music because of the church hymns his mother sang at home.
He soon began studying the keyboard, immersing himself in Brahms, Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach with the intention of becoming a concert pianist, an ambition he abandoned in his adolescence after breaking both index fingers in a rugby match.
After his piano teacher told him to consider conducting, he went to hear a live symphony for the first time. Ozawa, then 14, said he found the performance a revelation: not the metallic, screeching noise emanating from the radio or an old record player, but a swirl of movement and power that sent shivers through his body.
As Mr. Ozawa recalled, his mother then wrote a letter to a distant relative of hers, the cellist, conductor and teacher Hideo Saito, who had influenced the introduction of Western classical music to Japan and, in particular, among children. Japanese.
Mr. Ozawa paid for his lessons at Saito’s Toho Gakuen Music School in Tokyo by helping with orchestration and mowing the lawn. Emerging as the star student, he left in 1959 to compete in an international competition for young directors in Besançon, France, and took a two-month trip to Europe on a cargo ship.
He won first prize at Besançon and especially impressed one of the jury members, Charles Munch, music director of the Boston Symphony. Munch invited him to attend the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home in western Massachusetts, which had been founded in 1940 to foster young performers and composers.
Mr. Ozawa received Tanglewood’s highest conducting honor that summer of 1960, and Bernstein named him assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic beginning with the 1961-1962 season.
Bernstein’s influence on Mr. Ozawa was significant, not only in the physical aspect of their podium technique but also in their preference for fashionable clothing and their equally wild hair, which they liked to sweep back with one hand. in the middle of a particularly vigorous performance.
Such habits did little to endear Ozawa to his countrymen when he returned to Japan in 1962 to conduct the country’s premier ensemble, the NHK Symphony Orchestra. Some older musicians refused to play for him, finding his manners too arrogant and Westernized.
“For the Japanese, my talent had emerged too quickly,” he told the Globe years later. “I rose to fame the same way kernels become popcorn, quickly. The members of the orchestra boycotted me. They said he had bad manners. That was true. They said I put too much pressure on them. That was true. They said I was a bully. That was true. I thought it was just a matter of working hard. But the management was on the side of the musicians.”
However, Mr. Ozawa continued to return to Japan for engagements while quickly making a name for himself in North America.
At age 28, he became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer seasons at the Ravinia Festival. In addition, he was named permanent conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1965 and the San Francisco Symphony in 1970. Then Boston caught his attention, with the opportunity to take command of one of the oldest and most prestigious orchestras in the United States. Joined.
He became music advisor to the BSO in 1972 and music director the following year. Late in the decade, as communist China began to reestablish cultural ties with the West, he accepted an invitation to conduct the Beijing Central Philharmonic Orchestra in China. He also took the BSO on a tour of China, the first Western orchestra to undertake such an adventure.
In a heartbreaking decision in the late 1970s, Ozawa decided with his second wife, Vera, whose heritage was Russian and Japanese, that he would return to Tokyo and raise their two children there, immersing them in Japanese language and cultural values.
However, he continued to expand his duties. In 1992, he founded the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan, naming what immediately became one of the world’s leading youth orchestras after his teacher. As was typical among BSO music directors, he also served as director of the Tanglewood Music Festival, and in 1994, Seiji Ozawa Hall opened on its western grounds. Much of the financing came from the Sony company: Mr. Ozawa was now a national hero in Japan.
In 1997, Ozawa became a controversial figure at Tanglewood when he ousted a popular administrator, Richard Ortner, over conflicts over scheduling and student training. Many famous teachers, including pianists Leon Fleisher and Gilbert Kalish and bassist Julius Levine, walked out in protest.
Furthermore, relations with the BSO were deteriorating due to their itinerant workload, and what once seemed like a magical partnership with the orchestra seemed increasingly obsolete. The critical consensus was that he had overstayed his welcome. “He still dances on the podium with his trademark pixie charm,” observed composer and critic Greg Sandow in the Wall Street Journal, “but he looks a lot better than his orchestra sounds.”
Mr. Ozawa resigned from the BSO in 2002 to become music director of the Vienna State Opera, a position he held for eight years.
His first marriage, to the pianist Kyoko Edo, ended in divorce. He and Vera had two children, Seira and Yukiyoshi. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Ozawa held dual Japanese-American citizenship and described his life and career as a successful, if not always perfectly smooth, fusion of Eastern and Western culture and pride. “Western music is like the sun,” he told Time magazine in 1987. “All over the world, the sunset is different, but the beauty is the same.”