Ozawa conducted world premieres such as György Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony in 1975 and Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise in Paris in 1983.

[1] Ozawa was born on September 1, 1935, to Japanese parents in the Japanese-occupied Manchurian city of Mukden, now known as Shenyang in China.

[1] When his family returned to Japan in 1944, he began studying piano with Noboru Toyomasu, with a focus on the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Hideo Saito, his teacher at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, brought him to a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.

He studied conducting and composition, achieving first prizes in both fields, and worked with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Japan Philharmonic while still a student.

[1] Shortly after his arrival there, Ozawa won the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding student conductor, Tanglewood's highest honor, which earned him a scholarship to study conducting with Herbert von Karajan.

[2] In December 1962 Ozawa was involved in a controversy with the NHK Symphony Orchestra when some players, unhappy with his style and personality, refused to play under him.

[8] From 1964 until 1968, Ozawa served as the first music director of the Ravinia Festival,[1] the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

In 1967, Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra recorded Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie that Koussevitzky had commissioned and Bernstein first conducted with the BSO.

[14] When it was reissued on CD in 2004, a reviewer noted: "The orgiastic fifth and 10th movements still pack quite a punch, and in a very real sense, while many more modern versions have come and gone this one still holds its own with the best of them.

[1] In San Francisco, he combined Bernstein's charismatic style with the flower power of the west coast, wearing long hair and flowery shirts, and sometimes conducting cross-over programs.

He was involved in a 1974 dispute with the San Francisco Symphony's players' committee that denied tenure to the timpanist Elayne Jones and the bassoonist Ryohei Nakagawa, two young musicians Ozawa had selected.

[1] During the time, he impressed by "the brilliance of his interpretations, with his supreme command of the most intimidatingly complex scores and as a graceful, even glamorous stage performer".

[1] In 1970, Ozawa and Gunther Schuller became artistic directors of the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).

[22] This was the first time since 1961 that the symphony was performed live in the People's Republic of China due to a ban on Western music.

[23] Ozawa created a controversy in 1996–1997 with sudden demands for change at the Tanglewood Music Center, which made Gilbert Kalish and Leon Fleisher resign in protest.

[30][14] In 1998, Ozawa conducted a simultaneous international performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy at the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

On February 1, 2006, the Vienna State Opera announced that he had to cancel all his 2006 conducting engagements because of illness, including pneumonia and shingles.

[1][41] His last concert took place on November 22, 2022, with the Saito Kinen Orchestra where he conducted, in a wheelchair, Beethoven's 'Egmont' Overture, which was broadcast live to Koichi Wakata, an astronaut onboard the International Space Station.

[43][44] Daniel Froschauer, speaking for the Vienna Philharmonic, wrote: "We are happy to have experienced so many artistic highlights with Seiji Ozawa.