Florian Schmidt-Bartha was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1991 into a family of musicians as the child of a Romanian-German and a Swede with Hungarian roots. His father, Reiner Schmidt, fled Romania in 1969 by breaking through the window of the men's room during the interval of a concert of his string quartet in London.

After long studies with Annemarie Dengler-Speermann - Cellist of the renowned Bartholdy Quartet - at the PreCollege of the Würzburg University of Music, Florian continued his studies with Orfeo Mandozzi and Julian Steckel in Würzburg, Rostock and Munich. Other important mentors were renowned cellists such as David Geringas, Heinrich Schiff, Natalia Gutman, János Starker, Wolfgang Boettcher, Bernard Greenhouse, Joel Krosnick and Uzi Wiesel. During his studies he was a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

His work as a chamber musician and soloist has taken him through almost all of Europe, to Russia, Turkey, Australia and the USA. He has been invited to appear at festivals such as the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, the Würzburg Mozart Festival, the Stavanger Chamber Music Festival (Norway), the Cello Biënnale Amsterdam, the Beethovenfest Bonn, the "Stars of the White Nights" Festival St. Petersburg and enjoyed success as a soloist in collaborations with orchestras such as the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, the North German Philharmonic Rostock, the Romanian State Philharmonic Iași, the Polish Chamber Philharmonic Sopot, the Southwest German Chamber Orchestra Pforzheim and the Ensemble Reflektor. Conductors he has shared the podium with include Oleg Caetani, Gábor Hontvári, Wojciech Rajski and Othmar Mága.

In addition to his dedication to the solo and chamber music repertoire, Florian Schmidt-Bartha is fascinated by modern music and the interpretation of the acoustic fantasy of contemporary composers. He has worked with composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki, Toshio Hosokawa, Wolfgang Rihm, Marc Sabat and Walter Zimmermann and has premiered works by Alexander Khubeev, Konstantin Heuer, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, Dmitri Kourliandski and Klaus Lang.

In 2017 he founded - together with violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha - the CAERUS chamber ensemble, a chamber music collective consisting of outstanding instrumentalists from the young generation of European musicians. Inspired by Caerus – a religious and philosophical term in ancient Greece that stands for the unique and right moment to make a decision and that is also personified as a mythological deity - a flexible ensemble was created that plays in various in combinations of musicians – from duo to chamber orchestra; thus, their programmes gain maximum freedom and a relevant content. After their first projects in their founding year, including concerts at the festival Bronnbacher Musikfrühling in Bronnbach Abbey, the ensemble is experienced a renaissance in 2020 and has since performed at festivals such as Young Euro Classic in the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Kalamata International Music Days in Greece , 'Music at Tresanton' in Cornwall (UK) and at the Konzerthaus Blaibach. In addition, radio recordings by BR, BBC Radio 3 and Deutschlandfunk Kultur document the artistic work of the ensemble.

Florian Schmidt-Bartha plays a cello by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume (Paris, 1844) and lives in Berlin and his home village Boxberg (Baden). In addition to music, he is interested in culinary arts (active) and football (passive).