Cornelius Meister was born in Hanover in 1980. He studied piano and orchestral direction at the Hochschule in Hanover with Konrad Meister, Martin Brauss and Eiji Oue, then at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Dennis Russell Davies, Jorge Rotter and Karl Kamper. He was awarded the Audience Prize at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in 1998 and has been honoured at numerous competitions, including the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb in 2000. He was musical director of the Heidelberg Theatre and Philharmonic Orchestra from 2005 to 2012 and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2018. Since 2018, he has been the musical director of the Stuttgart Staatsoper and Staatsorchester. He is also the principal guest conductor at the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. He has made guest appearances conducting some of the great symphonic orchestras including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra (New York), the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Paris Opera Orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), the Tonhalle-Orchester of Zurich, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester of Berlin. After making his debut at the Hamburg Staatsoper at the age of 21, he made guest appearances at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the New National Theatre in Tokyo, the San Francisco Opera, the Theater an der Wien, Copenhagen’s Royal Opera, the Riga Opera, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Dresden Semperoper, the Royal Opera House in London, the Zurich Opera, and Milan’s La Scala. He received the Opus Klassik Award for Conductor of the Year in 2018 and the International Classical Music Award for his recording of all of Martinů’s symphonies. He also won the Diapason d’or and the German Critics’ prize for a DVD of Werther recorded at the Zurich Opera. During the 2019-2020 season, he conducted a new production of Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen in Munich, Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera, Arabella at the Vienna Staatsoper, and Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin, Don Carlo, Cavalleria rusticana, Luci mie tradicitri, Don Giovanni and Don Carlo in Stuttgart. He also continued a Mahler cycle with the Stuttgart Staatsorchester.