The Fainting Maestro

The popeyed, bushy-haired little man had scarcely raised his baton to signal the opening of the piano concerto's slow movement when he paled and swayed on the podium. Soloist Vera Franceschi swiftly signaled the sound engineers to stop the recording. Then she helped Conductor Franco Ferrara to a chair, plied him with black coffee. Ten minutes later he rapped the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome to silence, led them the rest of the way through a singing recording of Ildebrando Pizzetti's Canti della Stagione Alta.

The performance was an important step toward the recovery of an ailing man whom Arturo Toscanini once called "the greatest musical find of this century." Sicilian-born Conductor Ferrara, 45, guest-conducted the major orchestras of Italy in the '30s and early '40s, became his country's most famed conductor after Toscanini himself. But one day in 1940, while conducting Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, Ferrara suddenly stiffened and crashed backwards off the podium in a dead faint. In the next several years he fainted so regularly on the podium that he became known throughout Italy as "The Fainting Maestro." When he consulted doctors, they could only point out what he already knew: that he lost his genial manner in the presence of music and that his nervous tension built up to a fainting spell, usually as the orchestra approached the slow movement of the symphony or concerto he was conducting.

Sorrowfully, Ferrara gave up conducting, retired to a hermit-like existence. When San Francisco-born Pianist Franceschi, an old friend, arrived in Rome this spring on a recital tour, she took to visiting Ferrara to play him his favorite sonatas. Slowly she reawakened his interest, at last persuaded him to conduct an orchestra with herself as soloist for a series of recordings. Under Soloist Franceschi's watchful eye, the recordings were completed. It seemed this week that Conductor Ferrara may at last be licking his old weakness. Vera Franceschi is sure of it. She plans to bring him to the U.S. this fall, put him in the hands of competent doctors and eventually return him to full-time classical music. "If I can help it," says she, "he'll never faint again."

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