Robert Wright, a composer and lyricist who collaborated with George Forrest on the scores for such Broadway musicals as “Kismet,” “Song of Norway,” and “Grand Hotel,” died Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Miami, Fla. He was 90.

For much of their careers, Wright and Forrest specialized in adapting someone else’s music, usually a classical composer’s, and spinning it into something new.

They used their talent, for example, to take an obscure wedding dance by Edvard Grieg and turn it into “Strange Music,” a smash from “Song of Norway” (1944). They later transformed the exotic themes of Russian composer Alexander Borodin into songs such as “Stranger in Paradise” and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” for “Kismet” (1953), which won a Tony Award for best musical.

The songwriting team did much the same thing in Hollywood, working on dozens of films including “Maytime,” “Sweethearts,” and “I Married an Angel.” Among their Hollywood hit tunes was “The Donkey Serenade,” adapted from a piano piece by Rudolf Friml and sung by Allan Jones in the film “The Firefly” (1937).

“Writing original music is 10 or 20 times easier than the things for which we are best known,” Wright said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1989. “The first thing you have to do as an adapter is learn everything a composer ever wrote. Then you have to assemble and assimilate the music. And finally, think the way he did.”

The Wright-Forrest partnership lasted some 70 years, ending when Forrest died in 1999. It began in the late 1920s at Miami Senior High School, where they wrote the school’s theme, “Hail to Miami High.”

The team’s biggest hit was “Kismet,” a 1953 “musical Arabian Night” about a poet who becomes emir for a day, with music adapted from Alexander Borodin. It ran through 583 performances, and garnered a Tony for Best Musical, and another for Borodin, even though he had been dead since 1887.

Their last Broadway show was “Grand Hotel,” based on the bestselling 1929 Vicki Baum novel, which in 1932 became a successful movie starring Greta Garbo and John Barrymore. The musical, which opened in New York in 1989, had a turbulent production history.

Directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune, the show was in trouble during its Boston tryout. Tune brought in composer Maury Yeston to write additional songs. “Grand Hotel” ran for more than 1,000 performances, and all three men received Tony nominations for the score.