Invitation to the Waltz

Toscanini was tired and a little apprehensive: he had never conducted on the West Coast before. But the cause was good, a benefit for the Los Angeles Philharmonic pension fund.

The first half of the concert was brilliant: Rossini's Overture to Semiramide and Beethoven's Seventh. ("We didn't watch his baton, we watched his eyes," the concertmaster said. "They flashed for crescendo, smiled for melody, cried for the depths.") The 7,000 worshipers that jam-packed the huge Moorish Shrine Auditorium spent half the intermission praising the Allah of music and swearing that Toscanini was his only prophet.

Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn began the second part of the program. Then the incredible happened.

Barefoot Girl. The cellists had quietly wooed the woodwinds in the opening bars of Weber's Invitation to the Dance, and the woodwinds had answered softly to the climactic bar 23, when the invitation is over and the waltz begins. Suddenly from the left wings of the stage bounded a dark-haired, barefoot girl in black jersey shirt and slacks--in perfect time she lightly leaped across the stage, past the harpists, past the second violinists, behind the bent back of Maestro Toscanini, in front of the first violinists.

The audience, hardened to Hollywood interpretations of the arts, was not much surprised. But they saw that something was amiss when a stage manager appeared in the right wing. The dancer reversed her field, went bounding back across the stage, flinging her arms and pirouetting. As she passed behind the 78-year-old Maestro a second time, he spun completely around, stood dumfounded. "Stupida!" he exclaimed.

Once more she floated by. Toscanini's birch baton stopped in midair, his left arm was raised in a gesture of supplication. Then he dropped both arms to his sides, jutted his square chin forward, lowered his head. The orchestra gave up.

Dying Swan. At this point, two policemen appeared. They cornered the girl behind the first violins. Just before they led her off, she had a last moment of triumph, posing with her legs crossed and her arms wrung together like a ballerina in the final throes of the dying swan.

When she had been removed, Toscanini the Temperamental stood indecisive, holding up one hand while he mopped his balding head with the other. Then he turned back to the musicians, and there was deep laughter in his eyes. He raised his baton, looked quickly over the orchestra and said, "Well, the waltz!"

In a tiny apartment strewn with Toscanini photographs and record albums, the dancer, 26-year-old Helen Faville, a student of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (see below) said "You see, I am spiritually married to [Toscanini]. When he began directing the waltz . . . I could sense him saying 'Now'--and I was ready to dance for him.'"

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