Otto Taubmann (8 March 1859 – 4 July 1929) was a German composer and conductor.
Born in Hamburg, Taubmann was initially a merchant, studied piano, violoncello and composition in Dresden from 1879 to 1882 and made study trips to Paris and Vienna. He worked as a conductor for several years and was the owner of the Freudenberg Conservatory in Wiesbaden from 1886 to 1889. From 1895, he lived in Berlin, first as a theory teacher and music critic (among others for the Berliner Börsen-Courier) and from 1920 to 1925 he was a composition teacher at the Berlin University of the Arts.[1]
Taubmann belonged to the music section of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1917. His students at the academy included Ludwig Roselius and Walter Draeger among others.[2]
Taubmann's compositional output includes sacred and stage music in addition to Lieder and choral works. In addition to psalm settings and the choral drama Sängerweihe published in 1904 after a libretto by Christian von Ehrenfels, the opera Porzia after Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was premiered in 1916. Another opera entitled Die missbrauchten Liebesbriefe remained a fragment.
In addition to his own compositions, Taubmann published a large number of arrangements of pieces by other composers, including Heinrich Schütz, Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák. The arrangement of his Romance in C op. 42, written in 1909 and republished in 2007, was called "Excellent" by the otherwise very critical Sibelius in a letter to the publisher.[3]
Occasionally, Taubmann used the pseudonym Nambuat.
Taubmann died in Berlin at the age of 70. He found his final resting place on the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery.