小澤征爾·瞎子阿炳〈二泉映月〉走向世界的重要推手Seiji Ozawa · A Crucial Advocate in Bringing Blind Musician Abing’s The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring to the World
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician AbingSeiji Ozawa · A Crucial Advocate in Bringing Blind Musician Abing’s The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring to the World
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician Abing小澤征爾·瞎子阿炳〈二泉映月〉走向世界的重要推手
中國的貝多芬·瞎子阿炳

Seiji Ozawa, the renowned Japanese conductor of international stature, was born in 1935 in Fengtian, then part of the Japanese-controlled “Manchukuo,” in what is now Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China.

His father, Ozawa Kaisaku, was a dentist who lived in China for many years and later helped establish the Xinmin Society, a political organization active during the Japanese occupation. Ozawa moved to Beijing with his family as a young child and once lived in Xinkai Hutong. He did not return to Japan until 1944.

Thus, although Ozawa was Japanese, he spent much of his childhood in China. This unusual upbringing exposed him from an early age to the Chinese language, society, and culture. It also gave him a sense of closeness and receptiveness toward Chinese music that distinguished him from most foreign musicians.

In June 1978, inside an ordinary classroom at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, an extraordinarily moving episode took place in the history of the erhu’s journey onto the world stage.

Jiang Jianhua, then a seventeen-year-old erhu student, performed Abing’s The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring for the visiting Seiji Ozawa, filling the room with music that seemed to weep and lament.

Jiang played with her eyes closed, completely immersed in the music and unaware of what was happening around her. When she drew out the final note and opened her eyes, she was astonished to discover that Ozawa, sitting opposite her, was already streaming with tears, weeping like a heartbroken child.

According to the later recollections of Zhao Feng, then president of the Central Conservatory of Music, Ozawa was so deeply moved that he involuntarily bent down from his chair, as if intending to kneel on the floor. Zhao Feng, who was sitting beside him, immediately reached out and stopped him.

Seiji Ozawa, the renowned Japanese conductor of international stature, was born in 1935 in Fengtian, then part of the Japanese-controlled “Manchukuo,” in what is now Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China.

His father, Ozawa Kaisaku, was a dentist who lived in China for many years and later helped establish the Xinmin Society, a political organization active during the Japanese occupation. Ozawa moved to Beijing with his family as a young child and once lived in Xinkai Hutong. He did not return to Japan until 1944.

Thus, although Ozawa was Japanese, he spent much of his childhood in China. This unusual upbringing exposed him from an early age to the Chinese language, society, and culture. It also gave him a sense of closeness and receptiveness toward Chinese music that distinguished him from most foreign musicians.

In June 1978, inside an ordinary classroom at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, an extraordinarily moving episode took place in the history of the erhu’s journey onto the world stage.

Jiang Jianhua, then a seventeen-year-old erhu student, performed Abing’s The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring for the visiting Seiji Ozawa, filling the room with music that seemed to weep and lament.

Jiang played with her eyes closed, completely immersed in the music and unaware of what was happening around her. When she drew out the final note and opened her eyes, she was astonished to discover that Ozawa, sitting opposite her, was already streaming with tears, weeping like a heartbroken child.

According to the later recollections of Zhao Feng, then president of the Central Conservatory of Music, Ozawa was so deeply moved that he involuntarily bent down from his chair, as if intending to kneel on the floor. Zhao Feng, who was sitting beside him, immediately reached out and stopped him.

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Ozawa then took Jiang Jianhua’s hand and said emotionally through an interpreter:

“This kind of music should only be heard while kneeling. To listen while sitting or standing would be deeply disrespectful.”

Immediately afterward, he made another equally astonishing statement:

“If I had heard this erhu solo first, I would never have dared to conduct this work yesterday. I did not truly understand this music. I was not qualified to conduct it.”

The previous day, Ozawa had conducted the Central Philharmonic Orchestra in a string-orchestra arrangement of The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring. Yet only after hearing it performed as an erhu solo did he fully encounter the compassion, sorrow, and dignity at the deepest heart of the music.

This was the origin of the widely circulated story of Ozawa “kneeling to listen” to The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring.

Over the decades, the episode has been retold repeatedly in Chinese newspapers, magazines, and online articles. Some accounts have even dramatized it by claiming that Ozawa “dropped to his knees with a thud and remained there.” Such descriptions may be theatrically compelling, but they go beyond what the available historical evidence can substantiate.

The more credible account is that Ozawa was moved to tears after hearing the performance and bent forward as though he were about to kneel; Zhao Feng stopped him in time, and Ozawa did indeed say that “this kind of music should be heard while kneeling.” But he did not actually kneel on the floor throughout the performance.

What makes this episode truly moving is not whether his knees ever touched the floor. It is that a world-renowned conductor laid aside his status and authority before the music of blind Abing, openly acknowledged that he had not yet truly understood the work, and even declared himself unqualified to conduct it.

Such candor is far more powerful than any exaggerated tale of an “astonishing act of kneeling.”

To understand Ozawa’s statement that the music should be “heard while kneeling,” it is also helpful to consider how kneeling postures are understood in traditional Japanese culture.

In traditional Chinese thinking, kneeling often carries connotations of submission, supplication, confession, or even humiliation. Therefore, when Chinese readers hear that a world-famous Japanese conductor wished to “kneel” before Chinese folk music, they may easily interpret it as a reversal of status and hierarchy, or even approach the story with a certain fascination for the sensational.

In traditional Japanese culture, however, seiza—a posture in which one kneels with the buttocks resting on the heels—does not necessarily signify abasement or humiliation. It is also a formal sitting posture used to express solemnity, attentiveness, and respect during the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, traditional theater, and other dignified occasions.

Some people have therefore suggested that Ozawa’s reference to “kneeling to listen” may have carried a cultural meaning close to that of traditional Japanese seiza: not submission to another person, but facing a great work of art in the most solemn and reverent manner possible.

This interpretation has a certain cultural plausibility. However, no original Japanese recording or verbatim transcript of Ozawa’s remarks has yet been found. We therefore cannot prove that the Japanese term he used was seiza, nor can we conclude that the interpreter directly translated seiza as “kneeling to listen.”

The most prudent interpretation, then, is this: regardless of the exact Japanese word Ozawa used, and regardless of the precise posture he intended to adopt, he was expressing neither humiliation nor political flattery. What he expressed was the awe of a master who truly understood music when confronted with a magnificent work of art.

It was not one person bending the knee before another. It was one soul bowing before another soul.

Ozawa was not only profoundly moved by The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring. The experience also deepened his appreciation of Jiang Jianhua’s musical gifts and of the artistic value of the erhu as a Chinese traditional instrument.

Later in 1978, with the support of Ozawa and others, Jiang Jianhua was invited to the United States to participate in the renowned Tanglewood Music Festival and subsequently collaborated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.

Tanglewood is one of the world’s best-known centers of classical music and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For Jiang Jianhua, then only seventeen years old, to carry a Chinese erhu onto this important stage of Western classical music was in itself an event of extraordinary symbolic significance.

The erhu was no longer merely an accompanying instrument heard in China’s streets, traditional opera theaters, and Chinese orchestras. It was beginning to enter the awareness of the mainstream Western classical music world as a solo instrument in its own right.

This does not mean that The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring had never reached audiences overseas before 1978, nor does it mean that Ozawa single-handedly brought the erhu to the entire world. Nevertheless, his authority, reputation, and sincere admiration did encourage the mainstream Western classical music world to take the erhu more seriously—and to listen more attentively to Abing’s The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring.

In the years that followed, Ozawa continued to take an interest in and support Jiang Jianhua’s artistic development. Jiang later moved to Japan, where she devoted more than twenty years to performing and teaching the erhu. She trained and inspired large numbers of Japanese erhu players and enthusiasts, gradually transforming this traditional Chinese instrument into an important bond of cultural exchange between China and Japan.

In 1986, Suntory Hall opened in Tokyo. As part of its inaugural concert series, Ozawa conducted the New Japan Philharmonic, with Jiang Jianhua as erhu soloist, in the world premiere of Japanese composer An Shengqing’s Wind Shadow, a work for erhu and orchestra.

This performance marked an important step in the erhu’s entry into Japan’s mainstream classical music world. The instrument no longer appeared merely as an exotic curiosity from the East. It began to enter the creative vision of contemporary composers and to engage in a genuine artistic dialogue with large Western symphony orchestras.

Seiji Ozawa’s life formed a bridge between the musical cultures of East and West.

He achieved immense success on the most prestigious stages of Western classical music, yet he never treated Western music as the sole standard by which all art should be judged. When he heard a work left behind by a blind Chinese folk musician, he was still able to set aside his identity as a world-famous conductor and, with the greatest sensitivity and candor, experience the suffering, dignity, and strength within it.

If blind Abing gave The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring its immortal soul, and Jiang Jianhua gave it new life through her superb performance, then Seiji Ozawa, through his reputation, judgment, and actions, helped this Chinese folk-music classic enter a far broader international musical world.

For decades, people have repeatedly spoken of Ozawa’s “astonishing act of kneeling.” Yet what history should truly remember is not whether he actually knelt on the floor, but that he shed tears before Abing’s music, acknowledged the limits of his own understanding, and took concrete action to support Jiang Jianhua and the erhu as they entered the international stage.

That moment transcended nationality, geography, and culture.

Through an erhu and a single piece of music, The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring, a blind Chinese folk musician who had long since departed this world encountered, in music, a Japanese conductor who had been born in China and risen to fame across the globe. It was a meeting of souls that transcended both time and national borders.

This is the truest and most moving historical meaning of the story of “kneeling to listen” to The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring.

(To be continued)