Jörg Widmann was born in Munich in 1973. He studied clarinet at the “Hochschule für Musik” (Academy for Music) in Munich with Gerd Starke and later with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York. At the age of eleven he began to take his first composition lessons and continued subsequently his studies with Wilfried Hiller and Hans Werner Henze and later Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm.

As clarinettist Widmann's great passion is dedicated to the chamber music and he is regularly performing with partners such as Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Christine Schäfer and Gidon Kremer. He meets great success as a soloist in orchestral concerts in Germany and abroad working with conductors such as Christoph von Dohnanyi, Sylvain Cambreling, Christoph Eschenbach, David Zinman and Kent Nagano. 

In 2001, he was appointed as professor of clarinet at the Freiburg “Staatliche Hochschule für Musik” (University of Freiburg) where he also got the professor ship of composition in 2009. Jörg Widmann has received numerous national and international awards for his cultural works.