Lotti Tauber was born in 1944, in Winterthur, Switzerland, a primarily German-speaking city north of Zurich. Her mother Sabi and father Ignaz were close associates of the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, and her older brother Christian eventually became a Jungian analyst. Tauber began playing the piano as a child in this Jungian milieu, finding an early affinity with the works of Bach, Debussy, and Ravel, and understood her musical expression in terms of Jung’s concept of the “active imagination,” or the communication of conscious and unconscious thought. Eventually, Tauber began a formal education in music therapy, and also worked as a piano teacher and astrologist, occasionally performing piano in concert.
In her adulthood as a pianist, Tauber’s playing was chronically hindered by pain from tendonitis. A whiplash trauma of the cervical spine, sustained in a car accident in 1973, further worsened her condition. After traveling to Chicago in 1981 to seek surgical solutions to these problems, the mobility in Tauber’s hands was significantly improved and she began recording her own musical compositions.
She self-released eight albums over the following decade: Roundabout Ways (1981), Aufgehoben (1981), Bestimmung (1982), Courage (1982), von Zeit zu Zeit (1982), Planeten (1983), I Ging (1985), and Samowar (1986). To overcome the challenges of her disability, Tauber developed an iconoclastic playing style that focused on the movements of her thumb and ring finger, and her compositions were often structured and even determined by mystical texts related to her Jungian interests.
An outsider unknown even within the Swiss musical scene, she aligned her minimalism with the likes of Arvo Pärt and Phillip Glass, while making music that was still unapologetically first and foremost for and of herself. Tauber’s intense period of musical productivity in the 1980s coincided with the resumption of her physical decline following the reprieve given by her surgeries in Chicago, and in 1988, she elected to die on her own terms through euthanasia. At the time of her passing, Lotti Tauber was 44.
