Abba star Anni-Frid Lyngstad is 75 and enjoying Switzerland

Abba have gone down in history for 38 years, but the Swedish pop band’s hits are still catchy songs today, thanks also to the haunted voices of the two front women. One of them turns 75 today.

“My, my, Napoleon surrendered in Waterloo!”: When two young Swedes shouted these words to the audience of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, an international music career of unimaginable proportions was about to begin.

Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog not only secured the first ESC victory for the music nation Sweden alongside their future husbands Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. It is the beginning of a decade of the Abba craze, with one worldwide pop hit after another. Always in the middle: Anni-Frid Lyngstad, called Frida by everyone. The singer will turn 75 on Sunday (November 15).

From Zermatt to Lake Geneva

Today Anni-Frid Lyngstad lives away from the hectic world of music in Switzerland. She remained there even after the death of her third husband. For Frida, who is very close to nature and has long taken care of the environment, Switzerland is exactly the right place. “I too was born in the mountains,” she said in 2014 in the Scandinavian “Skavlan” program. “It’s like closing the circle. I went back to the nature I was born in. I like it great in the mountains. “Now she has moved from Zermatt, where she lived for a long time, to Lake Geneva.

Almost half a century has passed since the ESC’s historic appearance in Brighton, England. But even 38 years after its actual demise in 1982, Abba remains one of the most successful bands in music history with around 380 million records sold, its own museum, musicals and more. Otherwise only the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Metallica play in their league.

First blow of fate

No one could have predicted that Anni-Frid Lyngstad would play in this league, but that it would end up in music. When asked when he started singing, he always had a specific answer ready, the Abba Museum in Stockholm tells us: never – after all, he always sang. “I still sing – at home,” he revealed in one of his rare interviews in 2014.

Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s not always easy life began on November 15, 1945 in a mining settlement near the town of Narvik in northern Norway. Since her father was a German Wehrmacht soldier, she is considered a “Tyskerbarn”, a German child, as the children of the occupation were then called. Her mother Synni Lyngstad was only 19 when Frida was born and died of kidney failure in 1947.

After 32 years: reunited with his father

As a child, she moved to Torshälla in Sweden with her grandmother, where she was also granted Swedish citizenship as a teenager. At the time she believed her German father Alfred Haase was dead – until 1977: At that time, her Abba prominence meant she could be carried with him by the “Bravo”.

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“His name is Haase, he knew nothing,” the popular German youth magazine headlined at the time. There is no lasting contact. “It would have been different if I had been a child. But it’s hard to have a father when you’re 32, “he once said.

Frida is now famous all over the world, travels the world with Abba and recites one hit song after another. “SOS”, “Mamma Mia”, “Fernando”, “Dancing Queen”: what Abba touches turns into gold. Millions of people around the world fall into Abba hysteria and want to see Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida in their flashy dresses. Countless men adore blonde Agnetha and brunette Frida when they take the stage together and dance to the beat.

Privacy in retirement

1982 is (for the moment) the end. Abba have announced a “hiatus” for the band, which continues today: fans have waited in vain for the new songs “I Still Have Faith In You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down”, announced in 2018. Which is not. means that Frida’s mezzo-soprano voice has become mute since the end of Abba’s great period: she released three other solo albums – two in English, one in Swedish – and recorded duets with Phil Collins and Roxette front woman Marie Fredriksson , among others. above. In 2018 she was heard for the last time in Spanish alongside trumpeter Arturo Sandoval in the old Abba hit “Andante, Andante”.

Lyngstad’s life story also includes many blows of fate, including not just the separation from Benny Andersson in 1981, three years after their marriage. One of the two children of his first marriage to Swedish musician Rasmus Fredriksson, his daughter Ann Lise-Lotte, died in a car accident at the age of 31. In 1999 her third husband, the German Heinrich Ruzzo Prince Reuss von Plauen, died of cancer.

She has been dating the British aristocrat Henry Smith since 2008. The couple live very isolated and enjoy their private life, according to the celebrity portal “Promipool”. Former Abba manager Görel Hanser only reveals this at the request of the German news agency: Anni-Frid Lyngstad is doing well.

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