Music: Daughter of the Sun God

The 6,000 listeners in Hollywood Bowl could hardly believe their ears.

For the first few bars of a Peruvian folk chant called High Andes, the full-figured Peruvian girl onstage rumbled roundly at the bottom of contralto range. Then, to their astonishment, she soared effortlessly up a full four octaves, began trilling like a canary at the top of coloratura. At the end of her first song, the audience was still too surprised to raise more than warm applause. The second, Tumpa (Earthquake), brought cheers; after the third, a pyrotechnical Inca Hymn to the Sun, the applause and cheers swelled to a roar for encores. Guest Conductor Arthur Fiedler, who had a plane to catch, was obliged to break up the demonstration by launching his orchestra into Tchaikovsky’s noisy March Slav.

Voice of the Xtabay. By next nightfall, there was nothing too good for 28-year-old Yma (pronounced Eema) Sumac, the girl with the four-octave range (normal: two octaves). The critics were raving, movie producers were fighting over her, Capitol was rushing out an Yma Sumac album called Voice of the Xtabay, which it had recorded this spring.

So far as Yma herself was concerned, it was just about time for a little attention. Her story had some of the qualities of a movie scenario in itself. A proud, quicktempered beauty, she was born Emperatriz Chavarri in a tiny village in the highlands of the northern Andes. At the age of eight, she. was chanting rituals before 30,000 sun-worshiping Peruvian Indians. She is still a sun worshiper herself.

In time, word of her phenomenal “voice of the birds and of the earthquake” reached Lima. After traveling 16 days by boat, train and burro to reach her village, a party from Lima heard her, persuaded her parents to let her go to the capital to study.

Voice of Hollywood. In Lima in 1941, the late Grace Moore heard her, promised to launch her on a career in the U.S. But shortly after Yma got to Manhattan in 1947, the famed soprano was killed in a plane crash. With husband Moises Vivanco playing the guitar and cousin Cholita Rivero dancing (“The Inca Taky Trio”), Yma sang at a Pan American Union concert in Washington in 1948. Demanded the Times-Herald critic, after praising her to the skies: “What’s the matter with the Met?”

Nothing was heard from the Met. Yma sang in a folk-song festival in Carnegie Hall, did a turn in Manhattan’s sophisticated supper club, the Blue Angel. Last year, she made Arthur Godfrey’s radio show twice, We the People once. But until she hit Hollywood Bowl a fortnight ago, Yma never really caught on.

Now, Yma has been offered a lead in a new Broadway musical based on The Arabian Nights. She was definitely interested —provided her new movie commitments did not get in the way. Her first film will likely be either a screen adaptation of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, or an original story with a far from surprising title: Daughter of the Sun God.