Francis de Croisset (born Franz Wiener, January 28, 1877 – November 8, 1937) was a Belgium-born
FrenchThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
playwrightA playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
and
operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
librettist.
His opera librettos include Massenet's
ChérubinChérubin is an opera in three acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Francis de Croisset and Henri Cain after de Croisset's play of the same name...
(1905), based on his play of the same name, and
Reynaldo HahnReynaldo Hahn was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic and diarist. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie....
's
Ciboulette (1923).
He married, in 1910, Marie-Thérèse Bischoffsheim, the widow of banking heir Maurice Bischoffsheim and the daughter of Count and Countess Adhéaume de Chevigné. They had two children, Philippe and Germaine de Croisset. By this mariage de Croisset had a stepdaughter, the arts patron
Marie-Laure de NoaillesMarie-Laure de Noailles, Vicomtesse de Noailles , was one of the 20th century's most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Balthus, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Francis Poulenc, Jean Hugo, Jean-Michel Frank and others as well as her...
. The de Croissets' grandson
Philippe de MontebelloPhilippe de Montebello served from 1977 to 2008 as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. On his retirement, he was both the longest-serving director in the institution's history, and the longest-serving director of any major art museum in the world...
was director of the
Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
from 1977 until 2008.