However, the family came from nearby Tholey where her paternal grandfather Johann Theodor Schwind, a lawyer, had been posted from Berlin and worked as the court clerk.
Theodor Franz Schwind, her father, had grown up in the family home which had been converted from the refractory of a former Benedictine monastery, and married Bertha Heise, the daughter of the local postmaster.
Olga and her younger brother spent much of their early childhood with their grandparents, growing up in the magical ambience of the abbey church, the monastery gardens and monastic ruins that adjoined the family home.
[2][4] Later she attended school in Saarbrücken and then in 1903 went on to take a "finishing year" with the Ursulines at a convent across the border, in Belgium, at which stage she was already involving herself with organising student musical presentations.
The women were friendly with the princesses of the von Wied family, as a result of which many aristocratic doors were opened to them across Germany, Austria and Italy, where Schwind and de Rijk gave their Musica Antiqua concerts together, sometimes privately and sometimes in public.
[2] Although there is mention of Olga Schwind having "retired" in 1955, other sources suggest that she was still undertaking Musica Antiqua winter concert tours,[5] at least as far as southern Germany, during the later 1950s.
[7] A 1952 newspaper report on a concert appearance in the drafty confines of Schloss Elmau (near Garmisch) provides an engaging glimpse of Olga Schwind as "the master of Musica Antiqua with her unique collection of instruments, dating back as far as the ninth century, and her extensive repertoire of Medieval and Baroque songs in all the languages".
[8] There can be little doubt that by the time Olga Schwind died in the Casa Pineta on 12 May 1979, that unique collection of ancient instruments had become significantly larger.
Her nephew gained the impression from his relatively straight-laced father that his aged aunt had followed an alternative somewhat "Bohemian" path, tainted by a certain "artistic craziness".