Francis Burdett Money-Coutts

Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, fifth Baron Latymer, was an English poet and librettist born in London in 1852 who died in the same city in 1923. Coming from a family of bankers, he studied law at Cambridge, though he considered writing his true vocation from the outset, and he adopted the pseudonym "Mountjoy".

In the early 1890s he struck up a close friendship with Isaac Albéniz, who was then living in London. Money-Coutts offered him a considerable fee in exchange for setting his libretti to music. The first fruit of this collaboration was the opera Henry Clifford, which was followed by Pepita Jiménez, based on the novel by Juan Valera and regarded as the most important work of the partnership. His greatest ambition was an operatic trilogy based on Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The libretto of King Arthur was published separately in 1897, but Albéniz only managed to complete Merlin, as Lancelot and Guenevere were left unfinished at the composer's death in 1909. Money-Coutts also wrote texts for numerous songs by Albéniz.

His most valuable contribution to the history of music was the disinterested patronage that enabled Albéniz to devote his final years to composing Iberia, his celebrated work for piano.