He led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years, toured widely and helped dispel prejudices about East Asian classical musicians.
Seiji Ozawa, the high-spirited Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm in the 1960s and ’70s and then led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for almost 30 years, died on Tuesday at his home in Tokyo. He was 88.
The cause was heart failure, according to an announcement released on Friday by Veroza, his management office.
Mr. Ozawa had experienced years of health problems beginning in early 2010, when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He never fully rebounded from cancer surgery or from back problems that were made worse during his recovery, and he was hospitalized with heart valve disease later in life.
Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a widespread prejudice even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.
With his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless energy, he captured the popular imagination early on.
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