The oboist Hansjörg Schellenberger was born in 1948 into a family that encouraged his musical proclivities from an early age. At the age of six he began to play the recorder and by the age of ten was showing great enthusiasm for the performance of Baroque music and for composition. He began his study of the oboe at the age of thirteen, winning a German youth competition in 1965 and first prize as the best conductor at the Interlochen Music Camp in America. At the age of seventeen he began his study of the oboe, conducting and mathematics in Munich and in Detmold.

After success in various competitions, including the ARD in Munich in 1972, he started his career in 1971 with the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, serving as principal oboe from 1980. He has won an international reputation as an oboist, and has collaborated with the most distinguished conductors, including Herbert von Karajan, Carlo María Giulini, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, and James Levine. In chamber music his activities have centred on the Vienna-Berlin Ensemble. He established, with players from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Haydn Ensemble, of which he is artistic director, since 1991 playing music written by Haydn during his first years with the Esterházys. As a member of the Berlin Philharmonic he played under leading conductors and in 1994 began his career as a conductor, collaborating with the orchestras including the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestras, Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra of the Comunidad de Madrid, among others.

He has maintained a strong interest in contemporary music and has recorded with DGG, Denon, Sony Classical, Orfeo and other companies. In some of these he has collaborated with his wife, the harpist Margit-Anna Süss, winning the German Schallplatten-Preis in 1999. In 1997, together with his wife, he set up his own recording company, Campanella Musica, to record the repertoire that had seemed most significant to him duing his entire career.