Seiji Ozawa

Snapshot

Seiji Ozawa’s Salzburg relationship began when Karajan invited him to make his Salzburg Festival debut in 1966, and he returned to conduct there across the following decades. He was one of the first conductors from outside the European tradition to win a lasting place on the Salzburg stage.

The Story

Ozawa’s path to Salzburg was shaped by Karajan and Bernstein, the two conductors who most defined 20th-century orchestral conducting. He met Karajan while studying in Berlin after winning the 1959 Besancon conducting competition, and Karajan brought him to the Salzburg Festival for his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1966. The orchestra, which rarely welcomed newcomers, responded immediately. He returned to conduct 48 Festival performances over the following decades, including Cosi fan tutte in 1969 with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Kleines Festspielhaus, and the Berlioz Requiem at the Grosses Festspielhaus in 1969 with the Orchestre de Paris, a performance praised for its spatial antiphonal precision.

After Karajan died in 1989, Ozawa conducted the memorial concert at the Grosses Festspielhaus, with the Berlin Philharmonic, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and choirs from Tokyo and Berlin. It was a performance that bound two continents and two generations. In 2002 he became Music Director of the Vienna State Opera, a post he held for eight years. He was never artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, but his decades of guest conducting kept him closely tied to the city’s musical life.

He was Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years, from 1973 to 2002, and is regarded as one of the first conductors from outside Europe to lead major Western orchestras on equal terms. He died in Tokyo in February 2024.