Jörg Widmann is a German clarinetist, composer, university teacher, and conductor. He was born in Munich on 19 June 1973.
He studied clarinet at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and the Juilliard School in New York. His composition teachers included Hans Werner Henze, Wilfried Hiller, Heiner Goebbels, and Wolfgang Rihm. Since 2001, he has taught clarinet at the University of Music Freiburg.
Widmann regularly performs chamber music with Kim Kashkashian, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, and Hélène Grimaud, and has appeared in concert with conductors Christoph von Dohnányi and Kent Nagano. Wolfgang Rihm and Aribert Reimann wrote works for him. His music has been performed by the Arditti Quartet, the German Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic, as well as by soloists including Yefim Bronfman, Christian Tetzlaff, Anna Gourari, and András Adorján.
His compositions include the opera Absences (1990), the Fantasia for Solo Clarinet (1993), the piano sonata Flowers of Evil (1996–97), and several string quartets. Later works include the opera A Face in the Mirror (2003), the orchestral Mass (2005), the violin concerto (2007), the music-theater work Babylon (premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in October 2012), the oratorio Arche (2016), a second violin concerto (2018), and 7 Capricci for saxophone quartet (2021).
Widmann is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg, and the German Academy of Performing Arts. His awards include the Hindemith Prize and Schneider-Schott Music Prize (2002), the Ernst von Siemens Prize (2003), the Arnold Schoenberg Prize (2004), the Claudio Abbado Prize (2006), the Stoeger Prize (2008), the Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music (2018), and the Hamburg Bach Prize (2023).