By JAMES BARRON

Published: June 10, 2004

 

ASTLETON, Va.

LORIN MAAZEL has a farm. And on his farm, an hour south of Washington, are things Old MacDonald did not dream of: wax statues (like Madame Tussaud's) and a barnyard with a zebra, a camel and llamas ("Think Neverland, but tasteful," one recent guest said).

The animals were an afterthought. Mr. Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic and a conductor who has led more that 150 other orchestras and has made hundreds of recordings, just wanted a place in the country. And his ideas went beyond geographic coordinates. "My husband had this idea of Virginia, this mellow landscape, this relaxed lifestyle," said his wife, the actress Dietlinde Turban. "I had visions of `Gone With the Wind.' "

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The farm did come with a Civil War cannonball — more about that later. But what appealed to the Maazels was the huge, rambling chicken coop. They turned it into a "theater house," which can hold about 150 people, and because they had to build something on the rest of the chicken coop's large footprint, a great room where they can serve dinners to 40 or 50.

And, because a long narrow space was left over, they added a two-lane bowling alley. "We didn't know what else to do," Mr. Maazel said before a round of what he called "bad-form bowling" one May morning. His form was not that bad: he hit nine pins on two tries.

But back to the theater house. When it was completed in 1997 — after long years of planning and construction — the Maazels began asking their friends to perform for invited audiences. Claire Bloom read Shakespeare. The pianist Yefim Bronfman played Scarlatti, Schumann and Chopin. And last month, for the first time since Mr. Maazel, 74, took over at the Philharmonic in 2002, members of his orchestra played on the Maazels' stage. They gave it a rave review: "I have never heard such acoustics," said Sherry Sylar, the associate principal oboist, after a concert of chamber music.

The Maazels' house, across the road from the theater building, is a squarish brick structure from the 1850's with a columned portico and 10 fireplaces. It had multiple lives, first as a plantation owner's mansion and then as a hospital during the Civil War, or so the Maazels were told. By the time they crested the hilly driveway in 1988 and decided they had to have it, it was a former bed-and-breakfast with balky plumbing.

The Maazels went on a house-hunting trip — make that a farm-hunting trip — because Mr. Maazel wanted to live out a dream going back to his days as a young violinist in Pittsburgh. As he tells it, he became lost on a car trip on the way back from New York and ended up in Virginia. He remembers seeing fields and horses and houses built before the Civil War and saying, "You mean there are people who live here?"

The farm covered 75 acres — "Around here, that's nothing at all, a couple of fields," Mr. Maazel said. But the Maazels bought adjacent property as it came onto the market and now own 500 acres. "We spread out only out of self-defense," he said. "I read in newspapers of rock groups buying estates." He did not want to hear anyone else's music in an area where, as he put it, "you can hear people talking a mile away."

On this farm, a noise that sounds like a tom-tom travels, too. It came from the emus, a pair of ostrichlike birds, which were guarding two just-laid eggs. Emus, it seems, do not chirp or sing. They are their own one-note percussion section.

"We suggested to Lorin that he incorporate the sound in his opera," said Zarin Mehta, the president of the New York Philharmonic. "He laughed, meaning, Don't interfere with the process of creation." (The opera, Mr. Maazel's first, is a setting of George Orwell's "1984." Its premiere, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is scheduled for next May.)

Why the menagerie? Ms. Maazel-Turban said it began after she organized a school on the farm — a "home school co-op" for their three children and about 40 others nearby. A woman who lived in the vicinity raised exotic animals, and one day, Ms. Maazel-Turban said, "I went and asked if of her 15 animals she had one she wanted to sell." And so Isis the camel, named for the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, arrived.

Isis — and Penelope the pony and Zoey the zebra — live in the shadow of a house that Donna Fisher of the Rappahannock Historical Society in Washington, Va., said may have been a wedding present from the original owner, a planter named James Browning, to his second wife. Browning used lumber and bricks made by slaves who lived on the farm, Ms. Fisher said.

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Mr. Maazel pointed out the wide plank floors in the center hall as he headed for the staircase. Unlike Scarlett O'Hara's, it is not curved. "People keep asking how I stay in shape," Mr. Maazel said. "Now you see it. We climb these steps 30 times a day."

The Maazels say those steps were once climbed by Union and Confederate soldiers. Though there were only small skirmishes in the neighborhood, Ms. Fisher calls Rappahannock, the county that includes Castleton, "the bivouacking and moving through on the way to somewhere county."

The next big moment for the house did not come until after World War II. It was sold to Ralph Ingersoll, who had been the managing editor of The New Yorker in the 1920's and the editor of Fortune and publisher of Time magazine in the 1930's.

Ingersoll's biographer, Roy Hoopes, explained that he wanted to be a gentleman farmer. His wife at the time was the real farmer, raising chickens and driving to the Washington suburbs, where, Mr. Hoopes wrote, she "went door to door in her station wagon selling her eggs to the wives of Pentagon generals."

So the chicken coop grew into the "two long, unsightly buildings" that the Maazels saw. By then, they were dilapidated, and the chickens were long gone.

The Maazels toyed with turning it into a playhouse for their children, but decided on a theater instead. For the opening concert, Mr. Maazel invited the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. They agreed on a date in September. The Maazels figured there was plenty of time to finish their bigger-than-expected construction project — plenty of time to finish putting the stone facade over the tumbledown walls of the chicken coop, plenty of time to finish installing the sliding glass doors that look out on the Blue Ridge Mountains, plenty of time to debug the theater's computer-controlled lighting system.

A few weeks later, the telephone rang.

"Lorinchik?' " Mr. Maazel said, imitating Mr. Rostropovich's Russian-accented English: " `Sep-tee-em-ber? Nyet. June. You build. I play. June.' " Mr. Maazel called his architect, Sam Cliffton, and said words no client wants to say: "Three months early."

Mr. Rostropovich called again. "Lorinchik," he told Mr. Maazel, "I do you big favor" by changing the date to June. The Maazels were not so sure, what with contractors working round the clock and, among other things, the driveway unpaved. "They were still pouring the asphalt that morning," Ms. Turban-Maazel said, but everything was ready by the time the audience arrived and Mr. Rostropovich and Mr. Maazel began tuning up.

And the wax figures?

"We opened this theater with the Tchaikovsky trio," Mr. Maazel said. "I thought it would be great if we had a wax effigy of each composer." That sounds easy enough. Then came a call from the Paris studio of the artist, Maximilian Fleissbach: "We can't finish. We don't know the color of Tchaikovsky's eyes." Research by Mr. Maazel did not turn up the answer, so, he recalled, "I took a guess." He sent word to Paris: Make them bluish gray.

In the house itself, the Maazels added a greenhouselike room off the kitchen and a spa with an indoor swimming pool, which is reached by a tunnel under the backyard.

"It stuck in my mind how great it would be to have a spa with a pool you could get to in your terry cloth robe from your bedroom," Mr. Maazel said. "I said, `Let's build a tunnel.' Also, we've got cyclones here. God forbid, it could be a cyclone shelter."

Then there was the cannonball in the guest room. "The previous owner had said, `You can have that, it's cute,' " Ms. Turban-Maazel said.

"We'd have guests," Mr. Maazel said. "They'd say: `Can we get a fire going? How pretty the cannonball looks in the fireplace.' "

Then Mr. Maazel decided to have a fire drill. He brought in a retired fire chief to teach the family how to evacuate the house if necessary.

"He said, `What's that?' " Mr. Maazel recalled. "I said, `the cannonball.' He said: `I know. There are two kinds, the kind with gunpowder and the other kind. This is a time bomb. I am calling the U.S. Army.' "

A tanklike armored vehicle rolled in. The soldiers carried the cannonball — gently — to a field far from the house, where they detonated it.

"It left a 10-foot crater," Mr. Maazel said. "I spoke to the head of the squad. He said that's their job. They find booby traps in coffeepots and rocking chairs, just about anyplace. Farmers, when they're plowing, they think they've found a rock. He told me, `The U.S. Army put it there, we'll take it out.' "

Mr. Maazel has another project in mind. He wants to turn an old barn into a dance hall. "We love country music," he said.

But not for a while. "We put a decade into improvements," he said. "We thought we had earned some peace. No construction, no workers, just quiet."

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