Tribute to Seiji Ozawa

The Opéra national de Paris was saddened to learn of the death of the great Seiji Ozawa, conductor associated with the premiere of Olivier Messiaen's Saint-François d'Assise at the Palais Garnier in 1983.

A first-time assistant to Herbert Von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, he conducted the Orchestre de l'Opéra for the first time in 1977, with Hector Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, in a one-off concert. A single performance was enough to establish a relationship of trust with the Opéra's musical ensembles, which was grandly concluded in 2007 with Wagner's Tannhäuser in Robert Carsen's production. Over the course of three decades, Seiji Ozawa has made a profound impression on generations of the Orchestra's musicians through - as they put it - his profound humanity and his gift for communicating music, conveying his vision of the works he conducts as little as possible.

The influence of his master, the immense French conductor Charles Munch, is certainly no stranger to the quality of his interpretations of the national repertoire, in which he distinguished himself at the Opéra with Maurice Ravel's L'Heure espagnole (1979, 2004), Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des carmélites (1999) and, once again, La Damnation de Faust in 2001, in a version directed by Robert Lepage.

An all-round musician, he excelled equally in his direction of Turandot (1981), Fidelio, Tosca and Falstaff - all three in 1982 at the Palais Garnier - before indelibly stamping his name in the opera history books with Messiaen's Saint-François d'Assise.

The Opéra national de Paris salutes his memory with great admiration, profound gratitude and a pinch of nostalgia, as his death definitively turns a page in the musical history of the 20th century.