ALSO BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

FICTION

After Dark

After the Quake

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Dance Dance Dance

The Elephant Vanishes

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Sputnik Sweetheart

The Strange Library

A Wild Sheep Chase

Wind/Pinball

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1Q84

NON-FICTION

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Introduction

My Afternoons with Seiji Ozawa

Until we started the interviews in this book, I had never had a serious conversation with Seiji Ozawa about music. True, I lived in Boston from 1993 to 1995, while he was still music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and I would often go to concerts he conducted, but I was just another anonymous fan in the audience. Not long after that, my wife and I happened to become friends with his daughter, Seira, and we would see and talk to her father now and then. But our acquaintance was casual and had nothing to do with either his work or mine.

Perhaps one reason we never talked seriously about music until recently is that the maestro’s work kept him so fully involved. As a result, whenever we got together to have a drink, we’d talk about anything other than music. At most, we might have shared a few fragmentary remarks on some musical topics that never led anywhere. Ozawa is the type of person who focuses all his energy on his work, so that when he steps away from it, he needs to take a breather. Knowing this, I avoided bringing up musical topics when I was in his company.

In December of 2009, however, Ozawa was found to have esophageal cancer, and after major surgery the following month, he had to restrict his musical activities, largely replacing them with a challenging program of recuperation and rehabilitation. Perhaps because of this regime, we gradually began to talk more about music whenever we met. As weakened as he was, he took on a new vitality whenever the topic turned to music. Even when talking with a musical layman such as myself, any sort of conversation about music seemed to provide the refreshment he needed. And the very fact that I was not in his field probably set him at ease.

I have been a fervent jazz fan for close to half a century, but I have also been listening to classical music with no less enjoyment, collecting classical records since I was in high school, and going to concerts as often as time would permit. Especially when I was living in Europe—from 1986 to 1989—I was immersed in classical music. Listening to jazz and the classics has always been both an effective stimulus and a source of peace to my heart and mind. If someone told me that I could listen to only one or the other but not to both, my life would be immeasurably diminished. As Duke Ellington once said, “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to “good” music transcends questions of genre.

During one of Seiji Ozawa’s visits to my home, we were listening to music and talking about one thing or another when he told me a tremendously interesting story about Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein’s 1962 performance in New York of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. “What a shame it would be to let such a fascinating story just evaporate,” I thought. “Somebody ought to record it and put it on paper.” And, brazen as it may seem, the only “somebody” that happened to cross my mind at the moment was me.

When I suggested this to Seiji Ozawa, he liked the idea immediately. “Why not?” he said. “I’ve got plenty of time to spare these days. Let’s do it.” To have Seiji Ozawa ill with cancer was a heart-wrenching development for the music world, for me personally, and of course for him; but that it gave rise to this time for the two of us to sit and have good, long talks about music may be one of those rare silver linings that are not in fact to be found in every cloud.

As much as I have loved music over the years, I never received a formal musical education, have virtually no technical knowledge of the field, and am a complete layman where most things musical are concerned. During our conversations, some of my comments may have been amateurish or even insulting, but Ozawa is not the sort of person to let such things bother him. He gave each remark serious thought and responded to each question, for which I was tremendously grateful.

I handled the tape recorder, transcribed our conversations myself, and presented the manuscript to him for corrections.

“Come to think of it, I’ve never really talked about music like this before, in such a focused, organized way.” This was the very first thing Ozawa said to me after reading the finished manuscript. “But wow, my language is so rough! Do you think readers are going to understand what I’m saying?”

It’s true, the maestro does speak his own special brand of Ozawa-ese, which is not always easy to convert to standard written Japanese. He gesticulates grandly, and many of his thoughts emerge in the form of songs. Still, whatever “roughness” there may be in the way he expresses himself, the feeling he seeks to convey comes through with startling immediacy, overarching the “wall of words.”

Despite being an amateur (or perhaps because of it), whenever I listen to music, I do so without preconceptions, simply opening my ears to the more wonderful passages and physically taking them in. When those wonderful passages are there, I feel joy, and when some parts are not so wonderful, I listen with a touch of regret. Beyond that, I might pause to think about what makes a certain passage wonderful or not so wonderful, but other musical elements are not that important to me. Basically, I believe that music exists to make people happy. In order to do so, those who make music use a wide range of techniques and methods which, in all their complexity, fascinate me in the simplest possible way.

I tried my best to preserve this attitude when listening to what Maestro Ozawa had to say. In other words, I tried my best to remain an honest and curious amateur listener on the assumption that most of the people reading this book would be amateur music fans like me.

At the risk of sounding somewhat presumptuous, I confess that in the course of our many conversations, I began to suspect that Seiji Ozawa and I might have several things in common. Questions of talent or productivity or fame aside, what I mean here is that I can feel a sense of identity in the way we live our lives.

First of all, both of us seem to take the same simple joy in our work. Whatever differences there might be between making music and writing fiction, both of us are happiest when absorbed in our work. And the very fact that we are able to become so totally engrossed in it gives us the deepest satisfaction. What we end up producing as a result of that work may well be important, but aside from that, our ability to work with utter concentration and to devote ourselves to it so completely that we forget the passage of time is its own irreplaceable reward.

Secondly, we both maintain the same “hungry heart” we possessed in our youth, that persistent feeling that “this is not good enough,” that we must dig deeper, forge farther ahead. This is the major motif of our work and our lives. Observing Ozawa in action, I could feel the depth and intensity of the desire he brought to his work. He was convinced of his own rightness and proud of what he was doing, but not in the least satisfied with it. I could see he knew he should be able to make the music even better, even deeper, and he was determined to make it happen even as he struggled with the constraints of time and his own physical strength.

The third of our shared traits is stubbornness. We’re patient, tough, and, finally, just plain stubborn. Once we’ve decided to do something in a certain way, it doesn’t matter what anybody else says, that’s how we’re going to do it. And even if, as a result, we find ourselves in dire straits, possibly even hated, we will take responsibility for our actions without making excuses. Ozawa is an utterly unpretentious person who is constantly cracking jokes, but he is also extremely sensitive to his surroundings, and his priorities are clear. Once he has made his mind up, he doesn’t waver. Or at least that is how he appears to me.

I have met many different people in the course of my life, some of whom I have come to know pretty well, but where these three traits are concerned, I had never encountered anyone before Seiji Ozawa with whom I found it so easy and natural to identify. In that sense, he is a precious person to me. It sets my mind at ease to know that there is someone like him in the world.

Of course, we are also different in many ways. For example, I lack his easy sociability. I do have my own sort of curiosity about other people, but in my case it rarely comes to the surface. As a conductor of orchestras, Ozawa is quite naturally in touch with a large number of people on a daily basis and has to act as the guiding member of a team. But no matter how talented he might be, people would not follow him if he were constantly moody and difficult. Interpersonal relations take on a great significance. A conductor needs like-minded musical colleagues, and he is often called upon to perform social and even entrepreneurial tasks. He has to give much thought to his audiences. And as a musician, he has to devote a good deal of energy to the guidance of the next generation.

By contrast, as a novelist I am free to spend my life hardly seeing or talking to anyone for days at a time, and never appearing in the media. I rarely have to do anything that involves teamwork, and while it’s best to have some colleagues, I don’t especially need any. I just have to stay in the house and write—alone. The thought of guiding the next generation has never crossed my mind, I’m sorry to say (not that anyone has ever asked me to do such a thing). I’m sure there are significant differences in mentality that come from such differences in our professional functions, not to mention innate personality differences. But I suspect that on the most basic level, deep down in the bedrock, our similarities outnumber our differences.

Creative people have to be fundamentally egoistic. This may sound pompous, but it happens to be the truth. People who live their lives watching what goes on around them, trying not to make waves, and looking for the easy compromise are not going to be able to do creative work, whatever their field. To build something where there was nothing requires deep individual concentration, and in most cases that kind of concentration occurs in a place unrelated to cooperation with others, a place we might even call dämonisch.

Still, letting one’s ego run wild on the assumption that one is an “artist” will disrupt any kind of social life, which in turn interrupts the “individual concentration” so indispensable for creativity. Baring the ego in the late nineteenth century was one thing, but now, in the twenty-first century, it is a far more difficult matter. Creative professionals constantly have to find those realistic points of compromise between themselves and their environment.

What I am trying to say here is that while Ozawa and I of course have found very different ways to establish those points of compromise, we are likely headed in pretty much the same direction. And while we may set very different priorities, the way we set them may be quite similar. Which is why I was able to listen to his stories with something more than mere sympathy.

Ozawa is a thoroughly honest person who is not given to pleasantries just to make himself look good. And even now, past the age of seventy-five, he retains qualities that you know have been with him since birth. He answered most of my questions candidly and at length. That should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Of course, there were many things he chose not to talk about for one reason or another, some of which I could guess at and some of which I could not. With regard to both the spoken and the unspoken, in all cases, however, I felt a strong sense of identification.

In that sense, this is not a standard book of interviews. Nor is it what you might call a book of “celebrity conversations.” What I was searching for—with increasing clarity as the sessions progressed—was something akin to the heart’s natural resonance. What I did my best to hear, of course, was that resonance coming from Ozawa’s heart. After all, in our conversations I was the interviewer and he was the interviewee. But what I often heard at the same time was the resonance of my own heart. At times that resonance was something I recognized as having long been a part of me, and at other times it came as a complete surprise. In other words, through a kind of sympathetic vibration that occurred during all of these conversations, I may have been simultaneously discovering Seiji Ozawa and, bit by bit, Haruki Murakami. Needless to say, this was a tremendously interesting process.

Let me give an example of what I’m talking about. As someone who has never seriously read a musical score, I could not fully comprehend that process in concrete detail. But as I listened to Ozawa talk about it, observing his facial expression and tone of voice, I came to understand the deep importance of the act to him. Music does not take shape for him until he has read the score, burrowing into it with complete determination until he is satisfied that he has mastered every last detail. He stares at the complex symbols amassed on a two-dimensional printed page, and from them he spins his own three-dimensional music. This is the foundation of his musical life. And so, early in the morning, he gets out of bed, shuts himself up alone in his own private space, and reads scores for hours with total concentration, deciphering cryptic messages from the past.

Like Ozawa, I also get up at four in the morning and concentrate on my work, alone. In winter, it’s still pitch dark, with no hint of sunrise and no sound of birds singing. I spend five or six hours at my desk, sipping hot coffee and single-mindedly tapping away at the keyboard. I’ve been living like this for more than a quarter of a century. During those same hours of the day when Ozawa is concentrating on reading his scores, I am concentrating on my writing. What we are doing is entirely different, but I imagine we may well be the same when it comes to the depth of our concentration. It often occurs to me that this life of mine would not exist if I lacked the ability to concentrate. Without concentration, it would no longer be my life. I suspect that Ozawa feels the same way.

Thus, when Ozawa talked about the act of reading a score, I could grasp what he was saying concretely and vividly, as if he had been talking about me. This happened at any number of points in our discussions.

Between November 2010 and July 2011, and in several different places (Tokyo, Honolulu, Switzerland), I seized the opportunity to conduct the interviews compiled in this book. It was a decisive period in Seiji Ozawa’s life, when his primary activity consisted of recuperation. He had a number of follow-up surgical procedures, and he was going to the gym, working hard on his rehabilitation to regain the strength he had lost after his original surgery for esophageal cancer. He and I belong to the same gym, so I saw him in the pool now and then, soberly performing his exercises.

In December 2010, Ozawa performed a dramatic comeback concert at Carnegie Hall with the Saito Kinen Orchestra, the orchestra he co-founded in 1984 to honor his mentor Hideo Saito (1902– 74). (“Kinen” means “memorial.”) I could not attend the concert, unfortunately, but judging from the recording, I found it a wonderful, inspired performance, though the extreme physical toll it took on Ozawa was obvious to all observers. After six months of recuperation, Ozawa then directed the Seiji Ozawa International Academy Switzerland, which is held every summer in the town of Rolle on the banks of Lake Geneva; and after intensively training a select group of young musicians, he took to the podium again in Geneva and Paris, conducting the academy’s orchestra in two highly successful concerts. This time, I accompanied Ozawa to observe the entire ten-day period of training and performance. I was simply awestruck by the fierce intensity with which he threw himself into the work. I could not help worrying about his health, however, and how it would hold up under such a strain. All the music I heard was wonderful but Ozawa was the one who really made it possible, and he did so by using up every last bit of energy that he had to give.

As I watched him in action, however, one thing dawned on me: He can’t help himself; he has to do this. His doctor, his gym trainer, his friends, and his family could all try to stop him (and of course they did try, to a greater or lesser degree), but this was something he had to do. For Seiji Ozawa, music was the indispensable fuel that kept him moving through life. Without periodic injections of live music into his veins, he could not go on living. There was only one way in this world for him to feel truly alive, and that was for him to create music with his own hands and to thrust it as a living, throbbing thing into the faces of an audience: “Here!” Who could possibly tell him to stop? I too wanted to say to him, “You really ought to hold off a little, take some time to recover, and start performing after you’ve got your strength back. I understand how you feel, but you know what they say—‘Slow and steady wins the race.’ ” Really that was the only reasonable response, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it to him when I saw him wringing every ounce of strength out of his body to stand upright on the podium. I felt that those words would become a lie once I spoke them. To put it simply, this man was living in a world that transcended reasonable ways of thinking, just as a wolf can only live deep in the forest.

The interviews in this book were not undertaken to comprise a sharply chiseled portrait of Seiji Ozawa. They are intended neither as reportage nor as a theory of what makes one person tick. My only purpose in this book was for me, as a music lover, to have a discussion of music with the musician Seiji Ozawa that was as open and honest as possible. I simply wanted to bring out the ways that each of us (though on vastly different levels) is dedicated to music. That was my original motive, and I like to think that, to some extent, I have succeeded. The experience has left me with the deep satisfaction of knowing that I spent several delightful days with Seiji Ozawa listening to music. Perhaps the most accurate title for the book would have been My Afternoons with Seiji Ozawa.

It will be clear to anyone who reads this book that there are some breathtaking gems scattered among Ozawa’s many pronouncements. He speaks plainly, and the words he chooses flow naturally as part of the conversation, but among them lurk finely honed fragments of a soul as keen as a blade. To put it in musical terms, these are like subtle “inner voices” that you would fail to catch in a piece of music if you were only half listening. In that sense, Ozawa was an interviewee with whom it was impossible to relax. I had to stay constantly alert in case I might miss some furtive tone that I knew would be there. If I missed those subtle cues, the very meaning of what he said could be lost.

In that sense, Seiji Ozawa is simultaneously an unschooled “child of nature” and a fountain of deep, practical wisdom; a man who must have what he wants immediately and who can be infinitely patient; a man with bright confidence in the people around him who also lives in a deep fog of solitude. To emphasize just one side of this complex man would present a distorted portrait. In this book I have tried to reproduce what he told me as fairly as possible, in written form.

In any case, the time I spent with Seiji Ozawa was tremendously enjoyable for me, and I hope through this book to be able to share some of that joy with my readers. I would like to express my deep thanks here to Seiji Ozawa himself for having granted me so much time. Continuing these interviews at regular intervals over a long period involved many logistical difficulties, but my greatest reward came when the maestro told me: “Come to think of it, I’ve never really talked about music like this before, in such a focused, organized way.”

I hope with all my heart that Ozawa continues to give the world as much “good music” as he can for as long as possible. Like love, there can never be too much “good music.” The number of people who use it as a fuel to recharge their appetite for life is beyond counting.

Here I would like to thank Koji Onodera, who helped in many ways with the editing of this book. Because my own technical knowledge of music is limited, I benefitted greatly with regard to both terminology and factual information from the advice of Mr. Onodera and his deep familiarity with classical music.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

First Conversation

Mostly on the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto

WE HAD OUR first conversation on November 16, 2010, in my home in Kanagawa Prefecture, to the west of Tokyo. Together we simply pulled LPs and CDs off my shelves and talked about the music as it played. My plan for each session was to keep the discussion from wandering by setting a tentative theme. The central topic for our first session was the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto in C minor. We got to this by way of discussing the Gould and Bernstein performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 that he had mentioned to me earlier, but it so happened that Ozawa was scheduled to perform the Beethoven with Mitsuko Uchida the following month in New York.

In the end, due to a chronic back problem aggravated by the long flight and to a case of pneumonia brought on by the severe cold wave that struck New York that winter, Ozawa unfortunately had to cede the baton to a replacement, but on this particular afternoon we were able to spend a full three hours in a conversation that centered on the concerto. We took occasional breaks to prevent Ozawa from tiring and enable him to take in the periodic nutrition required by his medical condition.

Beginning with
the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 1

MURAKAMI: I remember you once told me about a 1962 performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 1 by Glenn Gould with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Before the performance, Bernstein turned to the audience and briefly announced that they were about to play the concerto according to Mr. Gould’s interpretation, with which he did not agree.

OZAWA: Yes, I was there. As Lenny’s assistant conductor. All of a sudden, before they started playing, Lenny came out on the stage and started talking to the audience. I couldn’t catch his English, so I asked the people around me what he was saying, and I got the general idea.

MURAKAMI: The speech is included in this live recording that I have here.

Bernstein’s speech:

OZAWA: That’s it, that’s it. But you know, at the time I felt that saying something like this before a performance was not the right thing to do. I still feel that way.

MURAKAMI: But he does it with so much humor, and the audience, while taken aback, is laughing quite a lot.

OZAWA: Well, sure, Lenny was such a good talker.

MURAKAMI: And there’s nothing grim about the speech. He just wanted to make it clear beforehand that it was Gould’s wish to set the tempo, not his.

The music begins.

MURAKAMI: Hmm, it is slow, isn’t it? Kind of strange. I can see why Bernstein wanted to explain himself to the audience.

OZAWA: This part is clearly in large duple time, two beats with the counts one two three/ four five six. Lenny is conducting this as six beats because duple would be too slow to maintain a consistent interval between beats. He has no choice but to conduct with six beats. Usually it’s one and and/two and and, conducted as one … two … Sure, there are lots of different ways to do it, but just about everybody does it like that. Here, though, at this slow tempo, he couldn’t maintain a consistent interval between beats, so he has to go one two three/four five six. That’s why the flow isn’t right and tends to get bogged down like this.

MURAKAMI: How about the piano?

OZAWA: I’m sure it’ll be the same.

The piano part begins (4:29).

MURAKAMI: Really, the piano is slow, too.

OZAWA: Yes, but it sounds perfectly fine, especially if you’ve never heard anyone else play it. You just assume that’s the way the piece goes. Kind of like a relaxed tune from the countryside.

MURAKAMI: But it must be hard for the performer to stretch it out like this.

OZAWA: Yes. Listen, though. When it gets to this part, you can’t help beginning to wonder.

MURAKAMI: Around here [the volume grows, the timpani enter (5:18)] the orchestra sounds as if it’s beginning to come apart.

OZAWA: True. This wasn’t recorded at Manhattan Center, was it? At Carnegie Hall?

MURAKAMI: Right. It’s a live recording from Carnegie Hall.

OZAWA: I thought so. That’s why the sound is so dead. You know, they did a proper studio recording of the performance the next day in Manhattan Center.

MURAKAMI: Of the same Brahms piece?

OZAWA: The same one. But the record was never released.

MURAKAMI: No, I’m pretty sure it’s not available.

OZAWA: I was there for that one, too. As assistant conductor. Where Lenny said in his speech that he could have let an assistant conduct it—that’s me! [Laughs.]

MURAKAMI: Meaning, if negotiations had broken down between the two of them, you might have conducted the piece instead of Bernstein … Still, this performance does have a good deal of tension to it.

OZAWA: Sure, sure. It’s a little unpolished, though.

MURAKAMI: Played this slowly, it sounds as if it could fall apart at any moment.

OZAWA: Yes, it’s right on the edge.

MURAKAMI: Come to think of it, when Gould played with the Cleveland Orchestra, he and George Szell couldn’t agree and an assistant took over for Szell. I read that somewhere.

The solo piano section of the first movement begins (5:56).

OZAWA: It’s strangely slow, but playing it like this, Gould makes it work. It doesn’t feel wrong at all.

MURAKAMI: He must have such an acute sense of rhythm. I mean, to be able to keep stretching it out like that, adjusting his sound inside the framework of the orchestra …

OZAWA: He’s got an absolutely solid grasp of the flow of the music. But Lenny’s got it absolutely right, too. He’s putting his heart and soul into it.

MURAKAMI: But isn’t this piece usually played as a big, passionate outburst?

OZAWA: True, with a lot more passion. You’re right, this performance is not what you’d call passionate.

The piano plays the first movement’s beautiful second theme (7:35).

OZAWA: Here, the slow tempo is just fine. With this second theme. Good, don’t you think?

MURAKAMI: It really is.

OZAWA: Before, the loud section was maybe a little sluggish or unsophisticated, but this really grabs you.

MURAKAMI: Before, you said, “Lenny’s got it absolutely right … He’s putting his heart and soul into it,” but you also said you thought it was not a good idea to get up like that and give a speech before a performance.

OZAWA: No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. But from Lenny, people were willing to accept it, I suppose.

MURAKAMI: I guess you mean it’s better to present music as music, without any added preconceptions. But from his point of view, Bernstein probably wanted to make it clear just who decided on the concept of the performance.

OZAWA: I suppose so.

MURAKAMI: Ordinarily, though, in a concerto, who is “the boss”—the soloist or the conductor?

OZAWA: In the case of a concerto, it’s mostly the soloist who does the heavy rehearsing. The conductor begins working on it maybe two weeks or so before the performance, but the soloist can be wrestling with it for six months or more. The soloist gets totally inside the piece.

MURAKAMI: Okay, but don’t you have situations where the conductor is so far above the soloist that he decides everything without consulting the soloist?

OZAWA: Maybe so. Take the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for example. Maestro Herbert von Karajan discovered her and right away had her recording Mozart and Beethoven concertos. You listen to those, and it’s overwhelmingly Karajan’s world. So then they thought it would be a good idea for her to play with a different conductor for a change, and Karajan chose me. “Do the next one with Seiji,” he said. So we recorded Lalo’s Spanish something-or-other. She was barely twenty years old at the time.

MURAKAMI: Edouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. I’m sure I’ve got a copy of that somewhere.

Rustling sounds as I hunt for the record, which finally turns up.

OZAWA: This is it! This is it! Wow, I haven’t seen this thing for years. The French radio orchestra [Orchestre National de France]. I can’t believe you have this. Even I don’t have a copy. I used to have a bunch of them, but I gave them away or people borrowed them and never brought them back …

Gould and Karajan,
Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 3 in C Minor

MURAKAMI: The main thing I wanted you to listen to today was the Karajan and Gould performance of the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto. It’s not a studio recording. It was recorded live at a 1957 performance in Berlin. With the Berlin Philharmonic.

The orchestra’s long, weighty introduction ends, Gould’s piano enters, and the interplay of the two begins (3:19).

MURAKAMI: Right here, the orchestra and piano are not together, are they?

OZAWA: No, you’re right, they’re out of sync here. Oh, here, too, they come in differently.

MURAKAMI: Does this mean they haven’t completely worked things out in advance during the rehearsals?

OZAWA: No, I’m sure they must have. But in passages like this, the orchestra is usually supposed to adjust to what the soloist is playing …

MURAKAMI: In those days, Karajan and Gould were musicians of very different status, I guess.

OZAWA: Well, sure, it was 1957—that was probably not long after Gould’s European debut.

MURAKAMI: Tell me if I’m wrong, but that whole first three and a half minutes or so, where it’s just the orchestra playing, sounds really Beethovenian to me, tremendously German. But then the young Gould comes in, and it seems he kind of wants to get away from that and loosen it up and make his own music. So then the two sides never quite get together, or they just coolly go off in their own directions and get farther and farther apart. Not that it seems wrong or anything …

OZAWA: Gould’s music is very free. Also, maybe it stems from the fact that he’s Canadian, a non-European living in North America. That might make for a big difference, too. That he doesn’t live in the German-speaking world. By contrast, Maestro Karajan’s got Beethoven solidly rooted inside him and it’s not going to budge. He might as well be out there playing a symphony. Plus he has absolutely no intention of cleverly adapting his style to fit Gould’s.

MURAKAMI: Kind of like, “I’m going to make my music the way it’s supposed to be made and you can do the rest of it any way you choose.” So then in Gould’s solo parts and cadenzas and stuff, he’s creating his own world. But the two never quite meet—they feel like they’re slightly out of kilter.

OZAWA: Which doesn’t seem to bother Maestro Karajan at all, wouldn’t you say?

MURAKAMI: No, not at all. He’s totally immersed in his own world. And Gould’s going along at his own pace as if he’s given up any hope of working together right from the start. It’s as if Karajan is building his music straight up from the ground, and Gould’s looking out at the horizon the whole time.

OZAWA: Interesting, though, isn’t it, listening to it like this? I don’t think there’s any other conductor who could perform a concerto with such complete confidence as though it were a symphony, not giving any thought to the soloist.

Gould and Bernstein,
Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 3 in C Minor

MURAKAMI: Now I’m going to put on an LP of the same Beethoven concerto, but this time it’s a studio recording made in 1959 by Gould and Bernstein with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (composed of members of the New York Philharmonic), two years after the one with Karajan.

The orchestral introduction. It has a kind of directness, like hurling clay at a stone wall.

OZAWA: This is totally different from Maestro Karajan’s, isn’t it? It’s certainly not a symphony. But the sound of the orchestra is so old-fashioned!

MURAKAMI: I never thought of this performance as old-fashioned before, but listening to it right after the Karajan, it does have a kind of antique sound about it. It’s a newer recording, too.

OZAWA: No, it really is old-fashioned.

MURAKAMI: Could it be the recording?

OZAWA: Well, maybe, but it’s not just that. For one thing, they’ve got the mikes too close to the instruments. Everybody used to do it that way in the States. Maestro Karajan’s recording captures the orchestra’s overall sound.

MURAKAMI: Maybe American listeners preferred that—a forceful, deadish kind of sound.

Gould’s piano enters (3:31).

OZAWA: This is two years later than the other one?

MURAKAMI: It’s three years before the fuss over the Brahms, two years after the performance with Karajan. What a contrast with the Karajan!

OZAWA: Yes, this one is much more Glenn-style. A lot more relaxed. But to tell you the truth … hmmm … I wonder if it’s okay for me to say this … I really shouldn’t start comparing Karajan and Bernstein. I’m thinking of the word “direction”—the direction of the music. In Maestro Karajan’s case, he had it from birth—the ability to make long phrases. It was something he taught us, the ones who studied with him. Lenny was more what you’d call a genius. He had an instinctive ability to make long phrases, but he couldn’t do it consciously, intentionally. In Maestro Karajan’s case, he would set his desires in motion by sheer force of will—in Beethoven, say, or Brahms. So when Karajan was conducting a Brahms, for example, his will had this overwhelming strength. And he would give it priority even if that meant sacrificing details of the ensemble. He demanded the same thing from us disciples.

MURAKAMI: Sacrificing details of the ensemble …

OZAWA: Meaning if the specific details didn’t all work together, you didn’t let it worry you. The most important thing was to maintain this long, bold line. In other words, “direction.” In music, direction involves elements of linking. You have detailed direction and long direction.

The orchestra plays an ascending three-note figure behind the piano.

OZAWA: These three notes are a case of direction, too: “La, la, la.” Some people can make them as they go along and some people can’t, these parts that flesh out the music.

MURAKAMI: So in Bernstein’s case, regarding what you call “direction,” it’s not so much mental calculation as instinct, something almost physical.

OZAWA: Something like that, I suppose.

MURAKAMI: And when he does it well, it’s fine, but when he doesn’t, things can come apart.

OZAWA: Right. By contrast, Maestro Karajan sets up the direction clearly beforehand, and he clearly demands it from the orchestra.

MURAKAMI: The music has already formed inside him before the performance.

OZAWA: Pretty much.

MURAKAMI: But Bernstein’s not like that.

OZAWA: Maybe not. He’s doing it more on the spot, instinctively.

The recording continues. Gould takes a relaxed approach with the solo (4:33-5:23).

OZAWA: Here, Glenn is being truly free with the music.

MURAKAMI: You mean, compared with the Karajan performance we just heard, Bernstein lets his soloist play more freely—and to some extent he makes his music conform to the flow of the piano? Is that it?

OZAWA: There is some of that, I’d say—in this piece, at least. But with the Brahms, it’s not so easy to do, so they had that problem we talked about—especially with that particular piece, the First Piano Concerto.

In the solo, Gould slows his phrasing way down and draws it out (5:01– 5:07).

OZAWA: Now that’s Glenn Gould, where he slo-o-o-ws it down like that.

MURAKAMI: He changes the rhythm so freely. That’s his style—if he were a writer, I might say it’s the way he delivers his sentences. It must be hard to accompany.

OZAWA: Yes, of course it’s hard.

MURAKAMI: So in rehearsal, that means you have to understand his breathing and try to match it?

OZAWA: Well, yes, but when you’re dealing with musicians of this caliber, they can do it in the actual performance, too. Both sides carefully calculate their moves, though it’s not so much a question of calculation as it is of trust. I tend to be on the receiving end of that trust—they take me too seriously. [Laughs.] So, often, soloists will do anything they like with me. [Laughs.] When a performance like that goes well, though, it’s fantastic. The music sounds so free.

The piano plays a descending passage, at the end of which the orchestra enters (7:07– 7:11).

OZAWA: Did you notice that? Near the end of the descending passage, just before the orchestra entered, Glenn added a kind of pon! sound to the note [7:10].

MURAKAMI: Added?

OZAWA: Sending a signal to the conductor, saying, “Come in here.” An accent that is not in the written score. It’s just not there.

The piano begins the famous long cadenza near the end of the first movement (13:06).

OZAWA: He’s down low, on that low chair of his, playing like this. [He sinks down in his chair.] I’m not sure what that’s all about.

MURAKAMI: Was Gould already popular back then?

OZAWA: Yes, he was. I was thrilled the first time I met him, of course. But he wouldn’t shake hands. He always had gloves on.

MURAKAMI: He was a real eccentric, I guess.

OZAWA: I heard all kinds of weird stories about him when I was music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra [from 1965 to 1969]. He invited me to his house, too …

Murakami note: Unfortunately, some of the anecdotes revealed at this point cannot be committed to print.

Final part of the cadenza. The pacing of the notes undergoes dizzying change.

MURAKAMI: His interpretation here is absolutely free, isn’t it?

OZAWA: Pure genius. Utterly convincing. But it’s very different from the score. Still, it doesn’t sound at all strange.

MURAKAMI: When you say things are not in the score, you don’t mean just in the cadenza or other solo parts, do you?

OZAWA: No, not just there. That’s what’s so great about this.

The first movement ends (17:11). I lift the needle.

MURAKAMI: You know, I first heard this Gould and Bernstein recording when I was in high school, and ever since then, this version of the C Minor Concerto has been one of my favorites. I like the first movement, of course, but in the second movement there’s that wonderful part where Gould backs up the orchestra with arpeggios.

OZAWA: You mean, where the woodwinds are playing …

MURAKAMI: Right, right. An ordinary pianist would make it sound like a straightforward accompaniment, but with Gould you get the feeling that he’s playing in direct counterpoint with the orchestra. I’ve always liked that part for some reason. It’s totally different from other pianists’ performances.

OZAWA: He would have to be overwhelmingly self-confident to do something like that. Let’s listen to it. It just so happens I’m working on this piece now. I’m going to be playing it soon with Mitsuko Uchida. In New York. With the Saito Kinen Orchestra.

MURAKAMI: I’m looking forward to that. I wonder how that performance will go.

I turn the record over and start the second movement, but first we take a short break to drink hot hōjicha tea and eat rice cakes.

MURAKAMI: I would guess that this second movement is difficult to conduct.

OZAWA: It is!

MURAKAMI: I mean, it’s so slow! It’s beautiful, though. The piano plays solo. The orchestra enters quietly (1:19).

MURAKAMI: The orchestra’s sound is a lot less hard than it was in the first movement.