The Swiss Jost Meier was a practicing musician, as a co-founder of the Biel-Solothurn symphony orchestra a formative conductor and, last but not least, a politically committed composer. Now the versatile man has died at the age of 83.
Jost Meier (1939-2022).
Airs and graces were foreign to him. He composed orchestral and chamber music and always discovered a unique sound quality for each instrument. In his stage works, he made the exclusion of the individual and the destruction of nature an issue early on.
Jost Meier was from Solothurn and had a special relationship with Biel; he had lived in Basel since 1980. Born in Solothurn in 1939, he began studying composition and violoncello with Rolf Looser at the age of sixteen at the Biel Conservatory. In addition, Meier studied mathematics and physics for a few semesters at the ETH Zurich. In 1964 he received his concert diploma as a cellist at the Bern Conservatory. He then continued his education as a composer with Frank Martin in the Netherlands. This quite idiosyncratic educational path also shaped the course of his later life.
Operas on political themes
From 1964, Jost Meier first played as a cellist in the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and in the Camerata Bern. Between 1969 and 1979 he worked for a decade as co-founder and chief conductor of the Biel-Solothurn Symphony Orchestra and, as a musical driving force, had a great influence on musical life there. From 1980 to 1983 he worked under Armin Jordan as Kapellmeister at the Theater Basel. From 1983 he worked as a freelance composer and conductor. From 1985 to 2004 he was a lecturer at the Music Academy in Basel and at the same time worked at the Swiss Opera Studio in Biel.
Stimulated by many years of theater practice, 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 1983 in Freiburg im Breisgau made headlines because of its blunt social themes in the alpine environment.
In 1994, Meier’s opera “Dreyfus – the Affair” was published at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with a libretto by George Whyte. The piece showed Meier as a politically engaged composer who was shaped by the movement of the 1968s and who thought little of bourgeois conventions throughout his life. In November 2017, his last opera «Marie und Robert» at the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn received a lot of attention.
Fine ear for the interaction
As a composer, Jost Meier was not an avant-gardist or iconoclast. He composed for voices, ensembles and orchestras with the fine feeling of the connoisseur and expert and with a keen ear for the interplay. Most recently in his concerto for cello and orchestra, which premiered in Biel in November 2019. This brought Meier full circle to his own beginnings as a cellist and as a 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 a gentle sense of humor and great openness. As has now become known, Jost Meier died on December 5, 2022 in Basel at the age of 83.