Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

MURAKAMI: Maybe neither of them wanted to be the first to broach the subject.

OZAWA: I wonder. In retrospect, it seems very strange.

MURAKAMI: So you were saying that Bernstein was playing Mahler in Vienna, too …?

OZAWA: Yes, I think he was. Hmm, come to think of it, it wasn’t that time, but I was there when he recorded the Mahler Second in Vienna. At that point I was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic’s regular season concerts, and he used the orchestra during the same period to make the recording. For Columbia. I’m sure it was Columbia because my great friend John McClure, the Columbia producer, came to Vienna to do the recording. In other words, the orchestra was playing regular concerts with me and making records and TV tapes with guest conductors in their spare time.

MURAKAMI: When would that have been?

OZAWA: Hmm, it must have been early in 1972, just after my daughter, Seira, was born. Lenny was staying in the Sacher Hotel and we were in the Imperial. We always stayed in the Imperial because they gave discounts to people with the Vienna Philharmonic. Lenny came for a visit there to see the baby. He walked right in, picked Seira up, and tossed her into the air. He said he was especially good at communicating with babies this way. Boy, did Vera have a fit! [ Laughter. ] “After all I went through to bear this child!” she said.

MURAKAMI: Well, he doesn’t seem to have done her much harm. She grew up okay. [ Laughter. ] I haven’t seen the video of the recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. He made a video around that time of the Second Symphony, but in that case the orchestra was the London Symphony, and they taped it in England. I’m pretty sure John McClure produced that one, too. They recorded it live in a big church before an audience. There’s no audio recording from CBS, though.

OZAWA: Well, maybe the tape they made in Vienna that time was for television, not a proper studio recording. But anyway, I’m quite sure that Bernstein performed the Mahler Second with the Vienna Philharmonic that time. His wife, Felicia, was there, too—a gorgeous woman, Chilean, with very fair skin. She had been an actress, a real beauty. She and Vera became very close friends. We were so poor then, she often gave Vera her dresses. “I know you like to wear pretty things,” she’d say. Funny, they had the same build.

MURAKAMI: How was the performance?

OZAWA: Well, I thought it was excellent. But he was very nervous. Usually, we’d have dinner together and relax over drinks the night before, but that time was unusual, we didn’t do that. We had a meal afterwards, though.

MURAKAMI: What kind of audience reaction was Bernstein getting from those passionate Mahler performances back in the sixties?

OZAWA: Just speaking of the Mahler Second I heard in Vienna, the audience reaction was terrific. I conducted the Second at Tanglewood after that, and that performance got a very good reaction from the audience, too. I remember thinking how great it was to get such a wonderful audience response doing Mahler. I think that may have been the first performance of the Mahler Second at Tanglewood.

MURAKAMI: How about with the New York Philharmonic?

OZAWA: Hmm, I don’t remember very well. [ After some thought. ] Well, I think the newspapers were kind of split, pro and con. Unfortunately for Bernstein, there was this music critic for The New York Times named Sean Berg or something. He hated everything that Bernstein did.

MURAKAMI: That was Harold Schonberg. He was very famous. I read a book he wrote.

OZAWA: Funny, in 1960, when I was still a student, I conducted a student performance of Debussy’s La Mer at Tanglewood. Three of us divided up the conducting duties, and I had the finale. Or maybe it was the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony. We divided that one up, too, among four of us, and again I did the finale. So then, the next day, Schonberg wrote about this in The New York Times. He was actually there for the Boston Symphony’s concert, but he also wrote about the student performance. About me, he said, “People should keep the name of this conductor in mind.”

MURAKAMI: That’s fantastic!

OZAWA: Yes, it was a total surprise for me, but it gets even better! He telephoned the top person at the student orchestra, and he came to meet me face-to-face and told me I should come and see him if I was ever in New York. He was not the kind of guy who said things like that to people usually, I heard. So not long afterward, I had something to do in New York and went there for the first time in my life. And since I was there, I went to visit him at his office at The New York Times. He gave me a tour of the place—here’s the print shop, here’s the music department, here’s the culture section … He spent a good two or three hours showing me around, and we even had a cup of tea together.

MURAKAMI: Amazing. He obviously liked you a lot.

OZAWA: It is amazing, isn’t it? Lenny used to kid me about it after I became his assistant. “The guy dumps all over me, but he can’t say enough about Seiji. ” Really, Schonberg was constantly criticizing Bernstein. I’d see his stuff in the papers and felt he was overdoing it. He was just terrible to Lenny. He was always kind to me, though. Maybe he thought of me as a new star he had discovered.

MURAKAMI: The New York Times music critics and drama critics were tremendously influential.

OZAWA: It’s true. I don’t know about nowadays, but back then they were hugely influential.

MURAKAMI: After all the battering he took from the New York media, Bernstein was welcomed with open arms by both the public and the press when he went to Vienna. This made him happy, but at the same time it made him wonder, “What was that all about in New York?” That’s why he shifted his base of operations to Europe in his later years. I read that in his biography.

OZAWA: I don’t know much about that. My English was so bad, I hardly knew what was going on. I do know that he was tremendously popular, that his concerts were always sold out, that Columbia was bringing his records out one after another, the movie of West Side Story was a huge hit—all that spectacular stuff was what I was aware of. Whatever led up to it, he maintained a great relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic in his later years.

MURAKAMI: He never served as music director with any orchestra after the New York Philharmonic, did he?

OZAWA: No, that’s true.

MURAKAMI: He was done with it, I suppose.

OZAWA: Ha ha, I wonder.

MURAKAMI: From what you tell me, though, by temperament he wasn’t suited to management. He just couldn’t use his position of authority to say no to anybody.

OZAWA: That’s true, he found it tough to look somebody in the eye and give him an order or reprimand him. Basically, he would never do that. Quite the opposite: he would ask for others’ opinions. When I was his assistant, he’d ask me after a concert, “Hey, Seiji, do you think the tempo of that Brahms Second was okay?” and stuff like that. I would be thinking, “What are you asking me for?” and I’d struggle to come up with an answer. So I always had to be very attentive at his concerts. I couldn’t just loaf around in the back of the hall, half listening, ’cause then I’d really be stuck if he asked my opinion afterwards. [ Laughter. ]

MURAKAMI: Was he really like that? He was honestly interested in other people’s opinions?

OZAWA: Yes, always. Even with a beginner like me, as long as we were making music together, we were equals.

MURAKAMI: In any case, when it came to Bernstein’s Mahler performances, opinions in New York were split, right?