Pianist Claus-Christian Schuster was born in Vienna in 1952. He studied in Vienna, Bloomington (USA) and at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow with his father Alfred Schuster, Wilhelm Huebner-Langenbruck, Hans Graf, Dieter Weber and Vera Gornostaeva. His meeting with Wilhelm Kempff in Positano left an indelible impression on him. He won several international piano and chamber music competitions and played as a soloist until 1984. That same year he founded the Wiener Schubert Trio, a regular guest at the most important music centres and the most renowned chamber music festivals such as: the Musikverein in Vienna with their own cycle since 1988, the Salzburg Festival, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, La Fenice in Venice, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, etc. After the dissolution of the Wiener Schubert Trio in 1993, Schuster and Martin Hornstein, the Trio’s cellist, invited Amiram Ganz to form the new Altenberg Trio Wien with them in the same year, continuing and intensifying its international chamber music activities until 2012, when Schuster was forced to leave the stage.
Between 1976 and 1986 Claus-Christian Schuster taught at the Musikhochschule Wien and from 1991 to 2012 he led a long series of advanced seminars in chamber music at the Vienna Conservatory (the Vienna University of Music and Arts). Together with his companions, he taught in numerous master classes in about ten European countries and the USA.
After 2012 Schuster, widowed since 2015, worked in musicological research and musical non-fiction.
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