Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa (1935–2024), who served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years and led the Vienna State Opera for eight years, was celebrated for his dynamic and limpid style on the podium and his distinctive mop of hair, reminiscent of Beethoven’s famous portrait. In 2010, during his hiatus following a major cancer surgery, Ozawa had a series of recorded conversations with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who transcribed and compiled their conversations into the book Absolutely on music.
In light of Ozawa’s death earlier this year, Absolutely on music remains the only published literature that substantially captures Ozawa’s own words and memories. The English title of the book is somewhat misleading. Although the book contains extensive discussions about music—mostly German classical music, which was Ozawa’s favorite—the conversations delve into much more, illuminating Ozawa’s life stories and personality.
At just 25 years old, Ozawa began his career as an assistant conductor under Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, where he quickly demonstrated both talent and dedication. Ozawa recalled his audition with Bernstein in Berlin:
“After a concert, we all piled into cabs and went to this sort of strange bar called Rififi where we drank and did the interview. They used the bar’s piano and did a kind of test of my ear…. My English was terrible at the time, so I could hardly understand what anybody was saying, but somehow I managed to pass [laughter] and become an assistant.”
Shown out-and-out favoritism by Bernstein, Ozawa made his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in early 1961. Unlike other assistants, Ozawa was given opportunities to conduct the premiere of Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Bacchanale alongside other major works, including the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird, during the orchestra’s tour of the U.S. and Japan. Ozawa remembered Bernstein introducing him to the audience saying, “Here’s a young conductor. I’d love to have you listen to him perform.”
Ozawa did not earn this favoritism by mere good fortune. Earning $150 a week, Ozawa lived with his wife in a small apartment near Broadway. During the sweltering summers, without air conditioning, they spent nights in the cheapest all-night movie theater, where they would get up every two hours as each movie ended, waiting in the lobby before the next one began. But Ozawa had no time for side jobs. He dedicated every spare minute to studying each week’s music, while living backstage at the concert hall. He was the hardest worker among his cohort, often covering for the other two assistants when they had side gigs. Essentially doing the work of three, Ozawa studied scores until he had memorized them. “You have to prepare every last detail,” said Ozawa. And luck, as they say, was what happened when preparation met opportunity.
Ozawa maintained such rigorousness throughout his career. In Boston, he dedicated his early morning–as early as four o’clock–to score reading before rehearsing with the orchestra at ten. In Vienna, where Ozawa did not have a piano at home, he went to the conductor’s room in the opera house and sounded the score on piano until all hours of the night–just as he had done in New York 40 years earlier. Ozawa was a disciplined musician, but he also had a mischievous side when he put down (or occasionally borrowed) the baton. In the mid-1960s, aside from his tenure in Toronto, Ozawa was often invited by Eugene Ormandy to guest conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. As Ozawa recalled,
“Eugene Ormandy was a tremendously kind man…. He once gave me a baton of his, and it was terrific, a special-order item, very easy to use. I had so little money in those days, I couldn’t afford a custom-made baton. One day I opened his desk drawer and found a whole row of them. I figured he wouldn’t miss a few batons if they were gone for a while and helped myself to three. But I got caught right away. [Laughter.] He had this scary woman for a personal secretary. She probably made a habit of counting the batons in his drawer and she grilled me. “You took them, didn’t you?” “Yes, I’m sorry, I took them.”
Murakami: How many batons were there in the drawer?
Ozawa: I don’t know, maybe ten.
Murakami: Well of course they caught you if you took three out of ten!
In 1963, Ozawa was appointed as the music director of the Ravinia Festival in the Chicago area. A rising star, he soon made his television debut on CBS’s game show What’s my line?
Absolutely on music came out as an intermezzo anticipating Ozawa’s ongoing musical career, though illness ultimately curtailed his public activities in the following decade. For readers discovering the book after Ozawa’s death, this intermezzo becomes an echo of his finale. Reading it during my daily subway commute to Manhattan, I could literally hear the rumble of the train that Ozawa had grumbled about while recalling a live recording at Carnegie Hall. I was on the R train, passing right underneath the venue. For an instant, my ear connected with Ozawa’s, reactivating a strand of his memory from 1977.
Memory is such a powerful human ability. It freezes a snippet of time and preserves it like amber, shareable through storytelling and, in that way, multiplies and remains alive. In the book’s afterword, Ozawa wrote, “Once I started remembering, I couldn’t stop, and the memories came back with a nostalgic surge . . . Thanks to Haruki, I was able to recall Maestro Karajan, Lenny, Carnegie Hall, the Manhattan Center, one after another, and I spent the next three or four days steeped in those memories.” Reading these memories, we thus keep them alive, through which we commemorate their owner, Seiji Ozawa.
–Written by Stella Zhizhi Li, Associate Editor, RILM
Read more in Absolutely on music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa by Murakami Haruki (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2016-23727). Besides the English translation, find the Japanese original and translations of the book in 11 languages in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
Read related Bibliolore posts:
https://bibliolore.org/2015/09/01/ozawa-arrives/
https://bibliolore.org/2016/05/14/the-boston-symphony-orchestra-archives/
