Born With a Golden Ear - washingtonpost.com

Of course, genes could be another explanation for his exceptional skills. He's the grandson of Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein), son of Mary Rodgers ("Once Upon a Mattress"). Yet it took him a while to decide to go into the family business.

When he was a kid it was a question of cool, and later it was something like self-defense.
"Our society is not too keen on the legacies," suggests Guettel (rhymes with "mettle"). "They're not like: 'Great -- some famous guy's grandson.

Let's really get behind that.' "
That attitude goes double for Broadway producers, who can't afford sentimental gambles at today's multimillion-dollar costs. "Have enough money to live on?

Sure," Guettel says of his birthright. "Instant success? Sorry.

"
Although his is a still-evolving career, the music he has produced is ravishing enough that "Piazza" director Bartlett Sher offhandedly calls him "the best composer in the American theater." And when "Piazza" was still in Chicago, critic John Lahr guessed it was too good for New York, writing: "Guettel's kind of talent cannot be denied. He shouldn't change for Broadway; Broadway, if it is to survive as a creative theatrical force, should change for him.

"
The sumptuousness of the occasionally operatic "Piazza" -- about a Southern mother abroad in Italy trying to protect her daughter from a potentially painful love affair -- is a world away from the stark, swooping Appalachian folk idiom of "Floyd Collins" (based on a trapped caver's true story that was a brief media sensation in 1925). And the mid-1990s song cycle "Myths and Hymns" (a.k.

a. "Saturn Returns") recalls everything from 19th-century church music to a Tin Pan Alley soft-shoe and even funk-fueled jazz-pop (think freewheeling Steely Dan). The music and lyrics claw at the gates of heaven in "Come to Jesus," as troubling and heartbreaking as it is complex.

The melody twists and soars in "Icarus," with Guettel himself singing in an ever higher voice that sounds as though it's answering a dare.
"I'd rather put myself in harm's way than take some safe route, I think," says Guettel, sitting in an empty office downstairs at Lincoln Center, where "Piazza" enjoyed its run last season (and where his next project, "The Princess Bride," will get its next private airing in a few months). His answers are often deftly technical -- so much so that when Sher says that Guettel "has the most astute overall theater mind of anyone I've met," you get why he says it.

Sher's preface -- "I don't know where it comes from" -- feels as if he's dodging the obvious. Clearly, Guettel was born to it. The composer recalls his mother taking him to a revival of "Oklahoma!

" when he was 2 years old, and he quickly asked when it would be over. "She said, 'You hate it that much?' And I said, 'No, I want to know how much longer I have, it's so good.

' "
He took up piano a couple of years later, and before he was a teenager, he was singing solos in the Metropolitan Opera choir -- "a wonderful childhood," he says of that time. He credits his mother with the bedrock of his musical education: "The primary colors of writing music were given to me in part by her just sitting around," he says. "She did not pull her punches.

I'd play her things when I was 13 or 14, and she'd say, 'You call that a melody?' I'd say, 'Yeah, I was thinking that was a melody.' "

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