A keen sense of interaction

Jost Meier was a Solothurn native with a special relationship to Biel and has lived in Basel since 1980. The conductor and composer was born in Solothurn on March 15, 1939. In 1955, he began his music studies with Rolf Looser in composition and cello at the Biel Conservatory. He also studied mathematics and physics for several semesters at the ETH Zurich. In 1964, he obtained his concert diploma as a cellist at the Bern Conservatory. He then studied with the composer Frank Martin in the Netherlands. This unconventional educational path shaped his life.

From 1964, Jost Meier played as a cellist in the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and the Camerata Bern. Between 1969 and 1979, he was co-founder and chief conductor of the Biel Solothurn Symphony Orchestra and had a major influence on musical life there as a source of musical inspiration. From 1980 to 1983, he was conductor at the Basel Theater under Armin Jordan. From 1983 he worked as a freelance composer and conductor. From 1985 to 2004, he was a lecturer at the Basel Academy of Music and also worked at the Swiss Opera Studio in Biel.

Inspired by his many years of theater experience, Jost Meier created his own operas with social themes in the 1980s. In 1982 he composed the opera Sennentuntschi based on Hansjörg Schneider's play of the same name. The premiere in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1983 made headlines due to its blunt social themes in the Alpine milieu. In 1994, the Deutsche Oper Berlin staged Jost Meier's opera Dreyfus - the affair based on a libretto by George Whyte. The piece showed Meier as a committed composer who was influenced by the movement of the 1968s and held little regard for bourgeois conventions throughout his life. In November 2017, his last opera Marie and Robert at the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn.

As a composer, Jost Meier was no avant-gardist or iconoclast. He composed for voices, ensembles and orchestras with a keen sense of interplay. Most recently in his concerto for cello and orchestra, which was premiered in Biel in November 2019. This brought us full circle to Meier's own beginnings as a cellist and conductor at the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn.

Jost Meier's scores, written with graphic care, have been in the Vera Oeri Library of the Basel Music Academy since 2018. He was a meticulous worker and an extremely amiable, modest person who met you in conversation with quiet humor and great openness. It has now been announced that Jost Meier died in Basel on December 5, 2022 at the age of 83. We will remember him as an imaginative musician and person.

Jost Meier, "Nocturnal Flower, Lyrical Scenes on Paul Klee" (2006)

Autograph from the Jost Meier Collection, Vera Oeri Library of the Basel Music Academy
Photo: Madeleine Lüthi 2020