"O Vecchio Tom!"

It's a long way from Canterbury to Rome, but an Italian composer has undertaken the cultural journey with fascinating results. Milan's La Scala last week staged a new opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti, based on T. S. Eliot's great verse play, Murder in the Cathedral. Italian title: Assassinio nella Cattedrale.

The perils of Pizzetti's journey were sizable. Eliot's spare verse and restrained, lugubrious lyricism simply could not be conveyed by the flowery, irrepressible Italian idiom. Thus "a sour spring, a parched summer, an empty harvest" sang out as "un'acre primavera, un'estate bruciata, ed un autunno sterile." The chilling wail of "Clear the air! Clean the sky!" came to sound like a line from a Verdi libretto: "Chiarite l'aria! Ripulite il cielo!"

But in his music, Composer-Librettist Pizzetti could be more faithful to Eliot than in words. Resisting the tempting opulence of much Italian religious music, Pizzetti went back past the Renaissance toward the medieval simplicity of Gregorian chant. Sometimes the music evoked Bach, sometimes such unsentimental modernists as Hindemith and Honegger. Musical highlights: the four separate orchestral colors for the four Tempters, who try to turn old Tom Becket ("O vecchio Tom") from God; the rhapsodic setting of Becket's great Christmas sermon; the palpitating, polyphonic patterns during Becket's murder.

For half a century Composer Pizzetti, 77, has been a kind of also-ran in European music, turning out eight operas, numerous songs, chamber and orchestral pieces that were always skilled, rarely inspired. With Murder in the Cathedral, he finally moved into a bigger league. After La Scala's brilliant production (with Basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni as Becket), Composer Pizzetti received a cable: "I am proud to be the author of the work that inspired you." It was from vecchio Tom Eliot himself.