Many composers would never have considered William Styron's 1979 novel ''Sophie's Choice'' as a subject for an opera. It's not just that the subject matter is too immense: Auschwitz, psychosis, the necessity for survivors of the Holocaust somehow to contain their horrific memories in a corner of their psyches if they are to go on with life at all. The problem is that inevitably any opera based on ''Sophie's Choice'' will be compared not just to Mr. Styron's remarkable novel but also to the shattering 1982 film, starring Meryl Streep in one of the greatest, bravest and most vulnerable performances in the history of cinema.

When the composer Nicholas Maw first saw the film on video some 10 years ago, he was convinced that there was an opera in the subject, that music could penetrate these looming characters in newly resonant ways. When he subsequently read the novel, he found the dialogue so elegantly direct and true that he decided to write his own libretto, lifted almost entirely from that dialogue.

With Mr. Styron's go-ahead, Mr. Maw, 67, who was born in England but has lived in the United States since 1984, secured a joint commission from BBC Radio and the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, then worked for six consuming years on the project. The much-anticipated premiere took place on Saturday night, in a powerful production by the director Trevor Nunn, with the orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle and an impressive cast headed by the Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager in the title role.

Mr. Maw's opera is an utterly admirable, affectingly conceived and beautifully realized work. The Covent Garden audience awarded him and the cast with a prolonged standing ovation.

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From the opening moments of the score, as the strings played subdued, luminous, tenderly tonal sustained chords, like some angelic, bittersweet chorale, Mr. Maw's reverence for this material was palpable. If anything, he has been almost too reverential, too respectful. Even in the score's most fraught and lashing moments, where jolts of Mr. Maw's early days as an exponent of serialism come through, there is a sense of reserve, of music providing commentary, not of claiming a subject in a bold new way.

Mr. Maw has long been a distinguished musical voice, but not a highly original one. For all its modernist touches, his language is nostalgic, lushly harmonic, Romantic in its sensibility. In his richly chromatic, acutely rendered harmonic vocabulary, you hear echoes of Mahler, Strauss, the Debussy of ''Pelléas et Mélisande,'' the Berg of ''Wozzeck,'' the neo-Classical Hindemith. The score breaks no new ground.

But music rich with a sense of memory is perhaps appropriate for what is really a memory tale. And having pared down the story to its key events, Mr. Maw never rushes the storytelling. The opera, in four acts (performed with one intermission) includes nearly four hours of music. Though the pace is deliberate, my interest never flagged.

The novel is narrated by Stingo, a young Southerner (a stand-in for Mr. Styron) who has moved to a postwar Brooklyn boardinghouse to become a writer. The first-person narrative is intentionally digressive, with poetic flights when Stingo speaks of his two great and perplexing friends, Sophie, an alluring but emotionally shattered Polish Catholic survivor, and her lover and savior, Nathan, a brilliant, vital Brooklyn Jew prone to bouts of rage that we come to learn are manifestations of paranoid schizophrenia.

The narration is also filled with Stingo's self-deprecating tale of his pent-up sexual longings, botched trysts and secret adoration for Sophie. That element is mostly left out of the opera, which is a loss, for it provides a bungling, messy human counterpoint to the grim accounts of Sophie's history and Nathan's illness.

Still, Mr. Maw has found a workable solution to the problem of translating a first-person narrative to the stage. Two characters portray Stingo: the American baritone Dale Duesing, called the Narrator, is Stingo in later life, who relates the tale to the audience in a series of flashbacks; the Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz portrays the young Stingo. In a poignant stroke, during the flashbacks the Narrator stays onstage to relive his youth.

In many scenes Mr. Maw's music is hauntingly beautiful and dramatically apt. When a chorus of huddled prisoners, including Sophie and her two children, are crammed into the boxcars of a train en route to Auschwitz, they sing soft, moaning utterances, as the strings play shimmering, parallel modal harmonies, while a wayward solo horn threads through the musical textures and a steady click-clack drum rhythm suggests the inexorable tread of the train.

Sometimes Mr. Maw's score is tellingly understated, as when Nathan rescues the weak, anemic Sophie after a fainting spell in the library and takes her home, where he cooks a high-in-iron meal of calf's liver and leeks as they tentatively exchange bits of their pasts in music of gentle, lyrical longing, tweaked with dissonance to suggest that there are more painful things they do not share.

The score disappoints in climactic moments of anguish and horror. Here Mr. Maw lays it on thick, with fractured harmonies, fitful lines, raucous brass and clashing percussion. There is not enough distinction between, say, the music when Sophie arrives at the camp and is hideously forced to choose one of her children for death, and the music that conveys the Narrator's memory of that one night of consummated ecstasy with Sophie.

But to his credit Mr. Maw provides rich, challenging roles for the cast, and under the assured direction of Sir Trevor, these singers inhabit them. Ms. Kirchschlager is wondrous. There are 17 scene changes and almost each one calls for her to switch costumes and enact a different phase of her life: from an obliging daughter of an intimidating and racist law professor, to a struggling mother in occupied Poland, to a scrawny camp prisoner, to an immigrant struggling to bloom under Nathan's chaotic guidance. Ms. Kirchschlager is a lovely woman and a graceful actress. Her singing is sweet-toned yet wistful, clear and true, impressively musical.

The American baritone Rodney Gilfry brings his husky voice, rugged good looks and physical agility to Nathan. He captures the dashing energy of the young man in his lucid moments. Still, it would be hard for any singer to match the actor Kevin Kline's Nathan in the film, whose glassy-eyed, unhinged fury was terrifying. In these moments Mr. Maw's music is not crazy enough. Mr. Gilfry's bouts of madness wind up seeming like pouts of temper.

Mr. Gietz is charming and sympathetic as young Stingo, singing with lyrical ardor yet anguished power when challenged by Nathan or in despair over Sophie. Mr. Duesing brings his dusky voice and steady presence to the Narrator. Frances McCafferty as the motherly landlady, Yetta Zimmerman; Stephanie Friede as Sophie's friend Wanda, a brave member of the Polish underground; and Stafford Dean as Sophie's surly father, are all strong. As the Nazi death camp commandant, the tenor Jorma Silvasti sounds vocally tight at times but projects the character's twisted nature.

Rob Howell's evocative set designs employ movable modules against dark backdrops to depict the various rooms and locales. Though the interiors are realistic, the trapezoidal shapes of the rooms give them an eerie, modern look. Sir Simon, a champion of Mr. Maw, conducts the music supplely yet incisively. The strings positively glow. He and the orchestra treat this score as if it were ''Parsifal.''

To quibble overly about a lack of spiky originality in Mr. Maw's music is to fault the opera for what it's not rather than to acknowledge it for what it is. Maybe the only way to make opera of ''Sophie's Choice'' is to treat the material with deferential and skillful care, as Mr. Maw has done. It deserves a future.

There are four more performances here through Dec. 21.

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