Seiji Ozawa trained his whole childhood to be a concert pianist until a teenage rugby game in 1950 broke two of his fingers and ended that dream in an instant. This episode traces how his teacher Hideo Saito took him to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, where the injured student stopped watching the keyboard and started watching the conductor. From there, Ozawa hustled his way to Europe with scooter-company sponsorship, won the Besancon conducting competition in 1959, and was mentored by both Herbert von Karajan in Berlin and Leonard Bernstein in New York.

We follow the NHK Symphony boycott that greeted his democratic rehearsal style back in Tokyo, the white turtleneck that replaced the tuxedo in San Francisco, and his record 29-year tenure at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The conversation also covers his concerts for peace in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the five-continent Ode to Joy broadcast at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, his late-life conversations with novelist Haruki Murakami, and a final wheelchair-bound performance in 2022 broadcast to an astronaut on the International Space Station.

• Born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1935 and named after two military figures
• How Ozawa blended Karajan’s plush legato with Bernstein’s rhythmic punch into a new hybrid sound
• Why the turtleneck was about shoulder mobility as much as breaking down elitist symbols
• His uncle’s Hiroshima experience and the decision to use music rather than politics for peace
• The distinction between perfect music and good music that emerged during his cancer years