Before mainly focussing on Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s musical to examine relevant correspondences with Shakespeare’s play (such as the sustained rhythm of physical confrontations, or the poetic stasis of pure love, or the hectic reactions induced by loss and despair, or other emotional archetypes), this chapter will examine former screen adaptations in relation with either music or singing or dancing (including George Cukor’s 1936 version, with Agnes de Mille as a choreographer; André Cayatte’s 1949 Les Amants de Vérone, with Isabelle Aubret as a singer and Renato Castellani’s 1954 version, with Roman Vlad as a composer), so as to consider how and when emotional intensity is added to the play-text, and how West Side Story takes after and also increases such emotional intensity, as it wonderfully combines its screenplay with songs, symphonic orchestra, melodic and rhythmic variations, the dramatic device of leitmotifs and choreography.

While Tolstoy is best known as a novelist, many become acquainted with his works through musical adaptations. These multinational adaptations span different genres and vary in their degrees of fame, sophistication, and resemblance to the original. This chapter adopts the analogy of a theme and variations to consider the symbiotic relationship between source texts and adaptations. The characteristics unique to literature vis-à-vis music are also discussed to illustrate the advantages and challenges of setting literature, in particular prose, to music. The chapter examines works in each genre with musical analyses and offers genre-specific commentary. In addition to instrumental music, ballet, and opera, musicals are included because they bridge high art and more popular genres and have been instrumental in revitalizing many classics of Russian literature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of operatic adaptations, using Prokofiev’s War and Peace as an example. The opera illustrates many challenges typical of setting sprawling prose texts to music of various genres, such as reducing the number of scenes and characters as well as reimagining the text. The appendix includes a list of adaptations; as many works on the list are not well known, they may be further examined by scholars.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.