Adam Guettel was born into a famous family, the grandson of Richard Rodgers and the son of Mary Rodgers, who wrote Once Upon a Mattress. But Guettel has made his own name as one of a handful of esteemed, but not-quite-commercial, young composers (not quite young either: Guettel is now 42). He may have broken the commercial barrier with The Light in the Piazza, which won the 2005 Tony Award for Guettel's score. Now playing in Denver, the show led Guettel to answer a few questions for the Rocky's Lisa Bornstein.

1 The musical is based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1953 novella about a mother and daughter finding love and difficulty on a trip to Florence. How did you first become acquainted with this story?

"I knew that I wanted to write a love story next, but I just didn't know what love story would be the right vessel for the kind of music that I had in mind. I wanted to write the kind of music that expressed falling in love, or having that love wrenched away from you, which is kind of the same music in a way.

"Embarrassingly enough, my mother recommended The Light in the Piazza. And I dutifully followed her lead and absolutely loved the novella. She had recommended it to my grandfather in the '60s, and he passed on it, and I bit."

2 Did you go to Italy to research the show?

"I went there for just under three weeks, and six hours a day I studied Italian, and the rest of the time I wandered around and took notes. Tried desperately to quit smoking. Not the place to do it."

3 How was the food?

"It was magnificent. I'm a real creature of habit. I like to know people and I like to feel known. I went to the same restaurant every day, and I went to two other restaurants every day. I wanted to have some pals over there. I would watch soccer in the same bar."

4 The music for this show is very different from most contemporary musicals. What dictated the style?

"What I usually start with is just a really specific energy, and I mean literally an energy, not notes or chords or even a shape. The energy was about making music for falling in love. One of my secondary points is that that music is also the sound of having love ripped away for you.

"I don't know if it's biochemical or something, but there is a primal kind of atavistic feeling that we crave. I think that the gaining of it or the falling in love and the having it taken away from you are oddly a similar physical feeling, and it's the physical feeling that I meant to find a musical analog for.

"That's all sort of technical and high-falutin'. What's really going on is I wanted to do a romance, I wanted to tell a story about emotional ambition."

5 Do you think you inherited any of your grandfather's inclinations musically?

"Not on a stylistic level particularly, but I really admire his consistent delivery of clear storytelling, of beautiful melodic writing, of writing that was character-specific. And that level of detail, I think, translates into longevity, that these stories he told have lasted the way they have, and I aspire to that."

6 Do you have any particularly lasting memories of him?

"He didn't die until I was 15. He was very affectionate and very funny.

"One time we were in the lobby of my grandfather's apartment building, right by the front door, and this is when he was very, very sick. He had two canes, one on each side. As we entered the elevator, a woman entered the lobby and she was on a walker. My grandfather, who was using esophageal speech, very cheerily quipped, 'I'll race you to the elevator.' "

The Light in the Piazza

• When and where: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays and April 5, 7:30 p.m. Sundays through April 8, Buell Theatre, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street.

• Cost: $10 to $65

• Information: 303-893-4100

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101