Lorin Maazel's widow picks up his artistic director baton

Dietlinde Turban Maazel, 57, has played a number of roles: actress, wife, home-schooling mother. Last year, her husband of 31 years, the conductor Lorin Maazel, died of a rare autoimmune disorder during the annual Castleton Festival, a training ground for young conductors, instrumentalists and singers that he founded and funded with her on their 240-hectare Virginia estate in 2009. Now Dietlinde Maazel, the widow, has taken over an institution that has become her husband's legacy. This year's edition will run through to July 19.

"The board suddenly had to step up to being quite an active board," she says, "because I don't have those funds any more. I'll be lucky if I can just keep all of this afloat."

Dietlinde met Maazel at the Bambi Awards, Germany's answer to the Academy Awards, in 1983. For the next three-plus decades, she followed his vision. "He kept saying, 'Don't walk away from your career,'" she says, "but I didn't want [it to be]; he is here, I'm there, and the nanny is with the kids somewhere else."

Maazel's vision brought them to Virginia, a state he had vowed to settle in when he first saw it as a student. It led to the construction of a small theatre in a building that was originally a chicken house, where the family began hosting performances by the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich - who inaugurated the theatre in 1997 - and Yefim Bronfman, James Galway and, of course, Maazel on violin.

And it led to the establishment of a summer opera festival in 2009. It wasn't long before Maazel erected a tent, and then a permanent structure, so he could move from chamber opera in the home theatre to what Dietlinde calls "the big 10", including Puccini's Trittico, La Fanciulla del West and La Boheme.