Paul Vidal

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Paul Antoine Vidal (Toulouse, June 16, 1863 - Paris, April 9, 1931) was a French composer, conductor and music teacher.

He studied at the conservatoires in Toulouse and in Paris with Jules Massenet. He won the Prix de Rome in 1883, one year before Claude Debussy did. On 8 January, 1886, in Rome, Vidal and Debussy performed Franz Liszt's "Faust Symphony" at two pianos for Liszt himself, an after-dinner performance that Liszt apparently slept through. The following day they played Chabrier's two-piano "Valses romantiques" for Liszt. Vidal conducted at the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique and taught at the Paris Conservatoire; his pupils included Jacques Ibert. His compositions, including the operas Eros (1892), Guernica (1895) and La Burgonde (1898), are virtually forgotten today.

He is perhaps better known today through his keyboard harmony exercises, Basses et Chantes Données which was a favorite teaching tool of his pupil, the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, and subsequently many of her students including Narcis Bonet who has republished a selection of these exercises under the title Paul Vidal, Nadia Boulanger: A Collection of Given Basses and Melodies".