Paul Antoine Vidal (16 June 1863 – 9 April 1931) was a French composer, conductor and music teacher.
Paul Vidal was born in Toulouse. He studied at the conservatoires in Toulouse and in Paris, under Jules Massenet in the latter. 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 Emmanuel 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 and Vladimir Fédorov. He died in Paris in 1931.
His compositions are virtually forgotten today: they include the operas Eros (1892), Guernica (1895) and La Burgonde (1898); the ballet La Maledetta (1893); a cantata Ecce Sacerdos magnus; Fête russe (1893); and incidental music to Théodore de Banville's Le Baiser (1888) and Catulle Mendès' La Reine Fiammette (1898). In collaboration with André Messager, he also orchestrated piano music of Frédéric Chopin into a Suite de danses (1913).
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".
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