Louis Victor Jules Vierne was a French organist and composer. Louis Vierne was born in Poitiers, Vienne, nearly blind due to congenital cataracts, but at an early age was discovered to have an unusual gift for music. (At age two he heard the piano for the first time: the pianist played him a Schubert lullaby and he promptly began to pick out the notes of the lullaby on the piano.) After completing school in the provinces, Louis Vierne entered the Paris Conservatory. From 1892, Vierne served as an assistant to the organist Charles-Marie Widor at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Vierne subsequently became principal organist at the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, a post he held from 1900 until his death in 1937.