A Complicated Gift

Looking like a beat poet or a heavy-lidded hustler, in jeans, disintegrating T-shirt and black leather jacket, Adam Guettel surfaces in the rare Seattle sun after a morning at the keyboard, his fingers actually bleeding. ''Lovely, don't you think?'' he asks, holding them up for inspection. He has been struggling to write a complicated new song this week -- also, depending on how you look at it, for three months or four years; four years is how long he's been working on ''The Light in the Piazza,'' a musical based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella. There's a dramatic hole at the heart of the story, and it needs to be filled soon because the show is about to open in previews. But difficult as the assignment may be, passionate as Guettel's writing process is, that's not what has done the damage to his hands. He's done the damage. With his teeth.

Later, indoors, he will demonstrate some of his other nervous habits, which may qualify, he cheerily admits, as obsessive-compulsive tics. ''I don't enjoy turning on or off a light switch without being slightly off the ground,'' he says, hopping on one foot. Then he shows me how pencils and other objects on his desk must be aligned along inscrutable axes only he can perceive. ''And of course I have to put my knee into the corner of a room.'' He does so, and laughs, as if at the antics of a not-quite-funny but tolerated drunk.

Envious souls, which is to say most everyone involved in the theater, might be glad to find this apparently superfortunate human reduced to weird marionette behaviors. And Guettel is a test of your tolerance: how talented, charming, wealthy and ''maddeningly good-looking'' (as his mother puts it) is it fair for one person to be? Among all the young composers working so hard (and so much more prolifically) to make a moribund art form sing, why is it Guettel who is dubbed the musical theater's crown prince and savior? That he is the most accomplished composer among them -- the most interesting lyricist too -- only makes it worse. That ''Piazza'' is such a brilliant property for musicalization is also galling. People are envious of Guettel not just because he gets the acclaim, but also because he deserves it.

The odd thing is that Guettel resents the acclaim (and the presumption of deserving it) almost as much as anyone else. The savior-of-the-musical mantle, however well it fits, also burns; he's constantly clawing at it, tearing it off. The ragged fingers and all the rest are part of that story. Spend a minute with him -- it takes only one -- and a picture of the terror behind the tics starts to emerge. A simple terror, at first: the superstitious habits began when, as a boy soprano singing Yniold in ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' at the Met, or the middle spirit in New York City Opera's ''Magic Flute,'' he was desperate to keep his voice from the looming precipice. ''The fear was of cracking,'' he says. It still is.

Glad to Be Unhappy,'' with music by the miserable Richard Rodgers and words by the tormented Lorenz Hart, is one of Guettel's favorite songs. It is also a birthright. Rodgers was his maternal grandfather. Unhappiness is his raw material. And if the anguish and ameliorations of art are an old story, there's a reason we're still interested in why creative types suffer. Or how they suffer, anyway. Some try to eat their piano-playing fingers, some cut off their ears, some stash liquor in the toilet tank to ensure access to oblivion. That last was Rodgers: arguably the greatest American composer, and inarguably an alcoholic, a womanizer, an all-around tyrant. The wayward Hart did everything possible to get away from him when he couldn't face the music. Even Rodgers's piano seemed desperate to escape: according to his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel, who is Adam's mother, it flew from under his importunate fingers as he sat there composing during a California earthquake.

Seventy years later, Guettel perfects his own means of escape -- emotional, technological, aesthetic. He calls himself a ''method'' composer, meaning that he burrows deeply into his characters' lives and, among other delaying tactics, stores reams of earnest notes on his Palm Tungsten W. ''Loving him is having him be not what you would have him be but a harbinger of your truer next self,'' reads one. ''Looking forward to love is just a fat line of cocaine.'' Like those sentences, the two works on which his reputation so far hangs seem almost willfully obscure. It would be hard to imagine either of them ever playing on Broadway, or Guettel wanting them to. ''Floyd Collins,'' a critical success at Playwrights Horizons in 1996, is based on the true story of a man trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925. ''Myths and Hymns'' -- more a cycle of art songs than a musical -- was inspired by Greek mythology and an 1886 Presbyterian hymnal. Neither piece reflects in any obvious way the life he knows. He was raised in the almost chokingly sophisticated precincts of the Upper West Side, a cultural Brahmin and a (nonpracticing) Jew. When asked how his last name is pronounced, he says it rhymes with ''shtetl.''