Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa
Absolutely on Music resulted from a series of conversations in 2011 and 2012 between the writer Haruki Murakami and the distinguished conductor Seiji Ozawa. The book was originally published in Japanese and translated into English for publication in 2016.
It is exceptionally rare for a musician of international stature to take time out of a busy schedule to reflect on his art and his career. It was possible for Ozawa only because he was recuperating from major surgery, which forced him to withdraw temporarily from his professional activities.
Ozawa has had a distinguished career as music director of the orchestras of Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston and, more recently of the Vienna State Opera. He is also founder and director of training academies in Japan and Switzerland.
Ozawa was a conducting student of Bernstein’s and Karajan’s, so obviously his talent was recognized early in his career. He has fond memories of both of these great artists who could hardly be more different in personality and musical approach. Ozawa learned from both of them, but they encouraged him to develop his own style of conducting.
While there are personal anecdotes about the greats of music (such as Glenn Gould, Mutsuko Uchida, Carlos Kleiber, and others), this book is no tell-all exposé, but instead the focus remains firmly on the music.
Murakami, who is an enthusiastic amateur not a trained musician, prepared for the conversations by listening to and assembling a collection of Ozawa’s recordings, most of them made with the Boston Symphony in the 1960s. He then listened to them with Ozawa and asked him to comment on them.
Ozawa does not dwell on the technical aspects of conducting, but rather focuses on more fundamental aspect of the conductor’s task of getting at the essence of the music being prepared for performance. Unlike other kinds of art, music is being created with each performance, and Ozawa’s comments about the evolution of his approach to certain pieces of the core repertoire, such as the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, is intriguing.
There is a particularly valuable section on the symphonies of Mahler with whose music Ozawa became associated later in his career. His insights into how Mahler’s music departs from the German tradition of Mozart, Brahms, and Strauss is intriguing. Mahler, of course, was one of the most distinguished conductors of his time, and the detailed performance directions he included in the published scores of the symphonies reflect that experience.
Until Mahler, orchestral music was structurally fairly predictable, even if the content was original. Mahler struck out in a wholly new direction. The idiosyncratic structure of the symphonies is wholly governed by the content, irrespective of conventional structural forms, such as sonata form or theme and variations.
Ozawa and Mahler were both music directors of the Vienna State Opera (the Court Opera in Mahler’s day), and Ozawa discusses his love for opera, perhaps the most difficult of all music to conduct and to perform. He had the priceless opportunity to learn from his mentor, Karajan, one of the greatest orchestral and operatic conductors of his own or any other day.
For the lover of music, Absolutely on Music is absolutely indispensable.
Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa
by Haruki Murakami
Alfred A. Knopf, 325 pp.
