11 - Beyond the far calls: the final years

Summary

By the year of his sixtieth birthday, 1990, Takemitsu's reputation as the senior Japanese composer of his generation had become an established feature of the international music scene. The prestigious circumstances of the Visions première – by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Daniel Barenboim – typify the level at which his music was now accepted in the West. So too does the stream of high-profile engagements, awards and commissions that continued to fill his diary over the next few years. From the perspective of Western reception, in fact, it now rather seemed as if contemporary Japanese music were Tōru Takemitsu.

All this hectic activity, however, came to a sudden halt in the summer of 1995 with Takemitsu's collapse and admission into hospital. Even here, deprived of the opportunity for any other kind of work, he methodically kept a diary and devised a fantasy cookbook of outlandish recipes, charmingly illustrated with meticulous pencil sketches, both of which have recently been published in Japan. Released from this spell of incarceration, his enthusiasm for all aspects of his creative life re-emerged unabated, but the reprieve proved short-lived. Takemitsu was readmitted to hospital, and there, on the afternoon of 20 February 1996, died of cancer, aged sixty-five – listening in his final hours, by some uncanny synchronistic coincidence, to a radio broadcast of the Bach work he loved above all others: the St Matthew Passion.