In this paper, an innovative piezo-hydraulic actuator (PHA) is considered that is intended to realize a fully variable valve control in camless combustion engines. A nonlinear model of the hydraulic system part is presented along with linear models of the remaining system parts. Accurate tracking of desired valve trajectories as well as soft landing despite disturbance forces and measurement noise is achieved using a combined control strategy. It consists of an input-output linearization of the nonlinear part as well as feedforward and linear quadratic integral (LQI) feedback control of the linear system part. Given measurements of the valve spool and engine valve positions, a Cascaded Extended Kalman Filter (CEKF) structure provides estimates for the immeasurable states. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.