1863–1931 · France · Romantic
Paul Vidal was a French composer and conductor from Toulouse who lived from 1863 to 1931. He won the Prix de Rome, conducted at the Paris Opéra, directed the Opéra-Comique and taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Lili Boulanger was among his pupils. The site carries his Air des folies d’Espagne for solo guitar.
Paul Antoine Vidal was born in Toulouse in June 1863. He began at the Toulouse conservatoire and went on to study in Paris, where Jules Massenet was his teacher. He took piano with Antonin Marmontel and harmony with Émile Durand.
In Paris he took first prize in harmony and then first prize in counterpoint and fugue. In 1883 he was awarded the Prix de Rome for his cantata Le Gladiateur.
From 1884 to 1887 Vidal lived in Rome as a scholar of the French Academy at the Villa Medici. On 8 January 1886 he and Claude Debussy, who had won the same prize in 1884, performed Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony in an arrangement for two pianos, with Liszt himself in the room.
According to a well-known anecdote, Liszt fell asleep during the playing. The next day Vidal and Debussy played him Emmanuel Chabrier's Trois valses romantiques.
From 1889 Vidal worked at the Paris Opéra. He began as an assistant chorus master, became head of vocal coaching in 1892 and a conductor in 1906. In 1906–1914 he was the house's principal conductor.
His debut on the podium came in 1894 with the opera Gwendoline; in 1893 he had rehearsed its singers for the Paris premiere. Later he directed the first staging of Ariane and gave Paris its first hearings of Roma, by Massenet, and L'étranger, by d'Indy. Together with Georges Marty he set up the Concerts de l'Opéra.
Vidal served as music director of the Opéra-Comique between 1914 and 1919. Productions he conducted there included new stagings of Alceste, Don Juan (Mozart's Don Giovanni in French), Iphigénie en Tauride and others, plus first performances of several operas and ballets.
Vidal wrote for the stage: the operas La Chanson du tzigane (1890), Guernica (1895), La Burgonde (1898) and Ramsès, the stage work Eros (1892), and the ballets La Maladetta (1893) and L'Impératrice (1901). He also left cantatas, choral works, among them the dramatic legend Saint Georges for soloists and chorus, chamber music and music for plays.
He orchestrated the score of Benjamin Godard's La Vivandière, which Godard had left incomplete. In 1913, together with André Messager, he orchestrated piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin as the Suite de danses.
Vidal taught at the Paris Conservatoire; in 1910 he took the post of professor of composition and fugue. His pupils included Lili Boulanger, Jacques Ibert, Raymond Loucheur, Albert Wolff, Jean Doyen and Eugène Bigot. Nadia Boulanger also studied with him.
Vidal compiled a book of keyboard harmony exercises, the Recueil de basses et chants donnés. Nadia Boulanger liked to use it in her lessons.
In 1899 Vidal became a knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 1927 an officer of it. He died in Paris on 9 April 1931 and is buried in the Batignolles cemetery. After his death Henri Büsser was appointed to teach composition at the Conservatoire in his place.
In his native Toulouse a street, the rue Paul-Vidal, bears his name.
Vidal’s output includes operas and ballets, cantatas, choruses and chamber music. Today these works are almost forgotten.
Today he is perhaps better known for his keyboard harmony exercises, the Recueil de basses et chants donnés, which Nadia Boulanger and many of her pupils used. One of them, Narcís Bonet, republished a selection of these exercises.
The site has one edition by Vidal: Air des folies d’Espagne for solo guitar, at intermediate level. It is the place to begin getting to know the composer at the instrument.