After completing his studies at the Salzburg Mozarteum, Peter Berne studied privately with Kurt Overhoff and Luigi Ricci and worked for many years as a conductor at various opera houses in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia and Finland. From 1991 to 1993 he was director of studies at the Vienna State Opera, where he was primarily responsible for the Wagner-Strauss repertoire and in this context also rehearsed the complete new "Ring" with the singers.

In the last decades, Peter Berne has devoted himself mainly to teaching. Between 1983 and 1993 he was a regular guest at the Musicological Institute of the University of Salzburg, where he taught courses on the Ring, the Meistersinger, Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as on vocal performance practice in Italian opera. Since then, Peter Berne has held guest professorships at the Royal Opera Academy in Copenhagen, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the University of the Arts in Berlin and the Music Academy in Hanover, and has been a guest rehearsal of Wagner and Strauss operas at the Theater du Châtelet in Paris and the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki; he has also held regular courses for the soloists at the Opera House in Gothenburg, Sweden.

He has master classes in Italian opera and bel canto at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, the Vadstena Academy in Sweden, the opera academies in Stockholm and Oslo, the State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, the “Mozarteum” in Salzburg, the Music University in Vienna and Graz, the Conservatoire in Toulouse, and at the music academies in Bern, Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Bremen, Halle, Cologne, Aachen and Nuremberg.
Since 2009 he has taught a course in bel canto at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy University of Music and Theater in Leipzig; since 2014 he has been teaching bel canto at the Hanns-Eisler University of Music in Berlin.