Castleton Farms: the Maazel family’s retreat and young singers’ haven

In the dressing room off the master bedroom, mezzo-soprano superstar Denyce Graves is choosing between a glittery black gown and a shimmery silver tunic. In the music room nearby, soprano Joyce El-Khoury has donned a full-blown scarlet va-va-voom gown and is topping the outfit off with dangly earrings. Down on the front lawn, a pair of two-week-old lambs is, yes, gamboling around a 280-year-old beech tree.

The divas — and ruminants — are at Castleton Farms in Virginia’s Rappahannock County, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. The dressing room and music room are part of the stately red brick pre-Civil War manor house that is home to conductor Lorin Maazel; his wife, the German-born actress and singer Dietlinde Turban Maazel, and their children. The house also “belongs” to the scores of musicians and singers who are part of the Maazels’ Chateauville Foundation musical programs and the Castleton Festival, the opera festival now entering its third season (June 25 through July 24). Graves and El-Khoury are here to do publicity pictures for the festival; keeping things in the family, the photos are being taken by the Maazels’ younger son, Leslie, whose luminous landscape shots anchor the festival’s Web site.

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Just another day in a privileged world where life, art and work are frequently the same thing.

The Maazels have called Virginia home for more than 20 years. Which is not to say they’ve spent the bulk of their time here. As Dietlinde Maazel explains it as she tours us through the house, rather than remain in Virginia and have Maestro/Father swoop in once a year from his worldwide conducting schedule to say hello to the children, the Maazels decided to travel as a family to orchestra dates, home-schooling the kids and exposing them to the sometimes glamorous, often hard-working world of opera and classical music.

Even when Lorin Maazel, now 81, was musical director of the New York Philharmonic from 2002 to 2009, the family always returned to Virginia, to a house with a long and varied history.

At the time of the Maazels’ purchase in 1988, the place had been a bed-and-breakfast for about a year. But it had spent most of the 20th century as a private home. Before that, during the Civil War, it served as a hospital, like so many similar houses across the region. Recently, Dietlinde Maazel says, descendants of the original builders, the Browning family, got in touch to say that in the 1700s their forebears had lived in a wooden mill, now lost to time, on the stream that runs through the property’s original 98 acres, before they built the manor house with bricks made by hand on the premises in 1857.

When the Maazels bought the house, it had a back porch (“kinda broken down,” Dietlinde says) with an awning, the only area where indoor and outdoor living met comfortably. From its short run as a B&B, there was wallpaper on every wall and carpeting everywhere. Today, in place of the sagging porch stands a large, handsome glass-and-iron conservatory, ordered prefab from England in 1997. Overhead now, there’s the incongruous sight of an antique Jugendstil chandelier that provides light while white-paddled ceiling fans churn the still air. The Maazels stripped away the carpeting throughout the house to reveal wide-plank floors with incomparable patina. There’s no more pattern on the walls, just paint in soothing neutral colors.