After making his debut at age 21 with the Hamburg State Opera, German conductor and pianist Cornelius Meister has developed an unusually wide range of talents for an artist in the early part of his career. He has become equally familiar in operatic and symphonic repertory, and in both mainstream and little-known repertory within each category.

Meister was born February 23, 1980, in Hannover. His father, Konrad Meister, has taught piano at the Musikhochschule in Hannover and been active as a concert pianist. Meister studied there with his father, Martin Brauss, and Eiji Oue. His conducting studies were pursued at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where Dennis Russell Davies was among his teachers. In the late 1990s Meister won several major prizes, including an audience award at the 1998 Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival.

After his Hamburg debut, Meister held conducting positions at Theater Erfurt and the Staatsoper Hannover. He became general music director for the city of Heidelberg (a post encompassing both the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra and the city's opera house) in 2005, at which time he was the youngest person in Germany to hold the post. He remained in Heidelberg through 2012. By that time he had been named (in 2010) chief conductor and artistic director of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. He remained there through 2018, moving in that year to Stuttgart for another joint opera-orchestra appointment: that of general director of the Stuttgart State Opera and Stuttgart State Orchestra.

Meister made several noted recordings in Vienna, including a box set of the complete symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu, released in 2017. That was one of three Meister recordings released that year; another was a recording of the rare Dvorák cantata The Specter's Bride. He has made various guest conducting appearances, including one, in 2009, with the San Francisco Opera. Meister remains active as a pianist and has performed chamber music in a clarinet-piano duo with Clemens Trautmann. ~ James Manheim, Rovi