Conductor Seiji Ozawa was born on September 1, 1935, in Xiangyan (formerly Fengtian), China. He studied piano from a young age and conducted under cellist and conductor Hideo Saito during high school. In the fall of 1959, he won first prize at the International Competition for Orchestra Conductors held in France. The following summer, Charles Munch, then music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a judge at the competition, invited him to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he won the Berkshire Music Center's highest award, the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding student conductor. He then studied under Herbert von Karajan in West Berlin. He caught the eye of Leonard Bernstein and served as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic for two years, starting in 1961. In 1973, he became the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 13th music director. He served in this position for an unprecedented 29 years, raising the orchestra's reputation not only in the United States but internationally as well, establishing it as one of the world's finest orchestras.

At the 2002 New Year's Concert, he became the first Japanese to conduct at the Vienna State Opera, and the performance was broadcast to 65 countries around the world. From the fall of that year until 2009, he also served as the orchestra's music director.

In Japan, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra with Kazuyoshi Akiyama, based on the 1984 Saito Hideo Memorial Concert in memory of their mentor, Saito Hideo. He had been undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer since 2010 and had been on hiatus since March 2012, but made a full comeback at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto on the 23rd of last month.