Bernhard Zachhuber was born in Linz in 1965. From 1983, he studied concert clarinet with Peter Schmidl and Johann Hindler at the University of Music in Vienna. Bernhard Zachhuber was awarded a diploma in instrumental performance (Appreciation Award by the Ministry of Education and Arts) and received a degree in Instrumental Education in 1990.
His career as a professional musician took off with a series of intense experiences with various orchestras. His involvement with Ensemble Aktuell, a symphony orchestra affiliated to the high school in Linz, brought about his first encounter with Franz Welser Möst; this was followed by an invitation to several tours with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, which had just been founded by Claudio Abbado, and a phase, lasting several years, as guest musician of the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera as well as the Vienna Philharmonic where he was able to work with a number of exceptional conductors.
His interest in contemporary composers which are still active – or at any rate not long deceased – had already been established for some time; it was further kindled by his participation in performances of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Zimmermann's Die Soldaten at the Vienna State Opera, and Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise at the Salzburg Festival as well as repeated engagements with die reihe and the Ensemble XXth Century, before he became a member of Klangforum Wien in 1994.
Apart from a few excursions to chamber music classics (Mozart's Wind Serenades, Schubert Octet, Brahms Sonatas and Clarinet Quintet at the Mozart Week in Salzburg and Tokyo or at the Chamber Music Festival Lockenhaus), Klangforum Wien has been his artistic home ever since. This has also enabled him to meet artists from a wide variety of fields: from Christoph Marthaler(Pierrot Lunaire, Quatuor pour la fin du temps at the Salzburg Festival and at the Guggenheim Foundation/New York), the choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas to Bady Mink, filmmaker from Luxembourg, with whom he created the production Free Radicals, which combines miniatures both in film and music and was shown in Venice, Hamburg, Vienna, Brussels, Luxembourg and New York.
Since 2008 he has been engaged in contemporary music education within the framework of Klangforum Wien's professorship at the University of Arts Graz as well as the Summer Academy Vienna - Prague - Budapest.
Beat Furrer and Georg Friedrich Haas have created new works for clarinet expecially for Bernhard Zachhuber.