Olga Schwind

Olga Schwind (born May 8, 1887 in Saarbrücken ; died May 12, 1979 in Ronco sopra Ascona ) was a German musician and pioneer of historical performance practice .

Life

Born in Saarbrücken and went to school, Olga Schwind was hired as a lute teacher at the Saarbrücken Conservatory . Between 1905 and 1907 her interest in the sound of historical instruments and classical music increased so much that she began to consult old folios, tablatures and handwritten notes and to decipher the operation of pre-industrial instruments with the help of pictures and other contemporary evidence. In the course of the following decades, with the help of craftsmen, she succeeded in recreating old instruments, including harps , panpipes , portatives and vaults .

She took lessons from Robert Korthe and Heinrich Scherrer (1865–1937) in Munich. From 1910 she began to put together a collection of Lorraine folk songs with Louis Pinck . In the interwar period she toured Europe. She performed her music both in Sami tents in Sweden, in front of an audience of the high nobility, as well as in front of Pope Pius XII. in Rome.

In 1939 she went into exile in the Swiss canton of Ticino , where she chose her summer residence in the Casa Pineta in Ronco on Lake Maggiore after the war, while she went on concert tours in winter. In 1955 she retired.

In Tholey in Saarland, the Olga-Schwind-Weg was named after her.

literature

• Ilse Reicke : The musician Olga Schwind - Weg und Widerhall , Darmstadt 1981

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 428.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Saarland biographies: Olga Schwind ( Memento from October 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive )