My million pound serenade: André Rieu makes sweet music with Liz Jones

A fairy-tale castle, a balmy evening, a superstar violinist playing to a captivated audience… Liz Jones receives a command performance from maestro André Rieu at his Dutch home

André performs to Liz on his 300-year-old Stradivarius, on the steps of his medieval castle in Maastricht

It’s embarrassing, being serenaded. Especially when it’s on the steps of a fairy-tale castle, by a man who has just told you that when he performs a piece of music it reverberates through his body like a caress, or a shudder, and that playing and conducting is ‘better than sex’. And where to look, while he is playing ‘La Vie en Rose’ to me on his nearly 300-year-old (and reputed to be worth millions) Stradivarius violin? Into his blue eyes, perhaps? André Rieu is the Patrick Swayze of classical music (it’s the hair, I think, that reminds me of the Dirty Dancing star; the macho cheesiness, the stupendous schmaltziness of his repertoire of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘The Blue Danube’).

I can only hold his gaze for seconds before giggling and looking at the ground, or staring at the mane of unruly, slightly mulleted curls that snakes over his blue velvet smoking jacket, above a pair of quite tight, inky jeans.

André’s home De Torentjes dates from the 15th century

I know that millions of women – middle-aged and older – would kill to be in my shoes, given the 64-year-old Dutch violinist and conductor’s sellout world tours and 35 million-plus album sales. I know because I met some of  his fans at the O2 arena in London last December, and they are a formidable bunch.

One of them, Mary, 65, told me, while sitting right next to her husband in the front row, why André Rieu is so very special. ‘André makes me have so many lovely feelings. He should run the government, you know. I’m so fed up with all the violence.’ That’s the key, you see: André’s world on-stage is so other; so safe and warm and lovely and effortless. But is his real life, off-stage, the same as this? Well, almost – and absolutely not.

The 15th-century castle we are in is, of course, André’s real-life home, slap bang in the middle of Maastricht in Holland. It has cone-shaped turrets,  chequered stone floors and fountains. It’s surrounded by high walls and iron gates, but his fans, who carve their names, usually encased in a heart, on his wall, can glimpse the castle from the river in the valley below: they float by on pleasure cruisers, a tour guide with a megaphone bellowing out André’s vital statistics.

I ask him, as we sit on the cobbled terrace, surrounded by giant pots of bougainvillea, whether it all gets a bit wearing? After all, it’s one thing to have knickers thrown on-stage (‘They are rather large, like a flag!’ he told me last December), quite another to have women turning up at his home. ‘As long as they respect me and my privacy, then it’s OK, but when they stand in front of my door, waiting for me to come out, then it’s not nice any more.’

The castle looms large, not just on the horizon, but in André’s life – he was born and raised near this spot. His father was a conductor and instilled in André his love of music. As a child, having briefly wanted to be a priest, he started having piano lessons in this very building, which, legend has it, was where the real D’Artagnan ate his last breakfast. André disliked his piano teacher, who lived here, and soon gave up the piano for the violin. Did he fall in love with the castle as a child? ‘No, not at all. The castle was gloomy and dark and moist and I hated the piano. I was afraid of this place.’

He and his family have lived at their home for 15 years

André studied music, played in orchestras, then, in 1987, decided to strike out on his own with 12 musicians. Eventually, the castle came up for sale. ‘The people living here could not afford to maintain it, so it was in a terrible state. I’m glad I can try to rebuild it for the next generation, as somewhere my grandson might want to live. We have been here 15 years now.’

‘We’ is André, his wife Marjorie and several hundred Costa Rican butterflies in an orangery across the courtyard that are all, disappointingly, still cocooned. André and Marjorie’s 32-year-old son Pierre lives next door with his wife and their twin daughters, who are nearly four (André has his blonde granddaughters as his phone screensaver, and is proud that they have already started to play mini violins). Pierre, endlessly amiable and polite, helps to manage the 110-strong Johann Strauss Orchestra – formed 26 years ago and one of the few private orchestras of its kind – and accompanies his father on tour.

The repertoire is stupendously populist – ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘Bolero’ – which means classical purists, and critics, love to dismiss him. ‘I don’t care about the critics,’ he says. ‘People shush you if you cough, or clap in the wrong place [at classical concerts]. That is not the case when I play. They say, “You are making it lower-level,” but that’s not true; I think I open it up for the audience, for everybody.’

‘I don’t care about the critics. I open music up for everybody’

Is it hard to adjust, I ask, to return home after being away performing?

‘I had the first mobile phone, and nowadays you can Skype and everything is possible. I also try to only be away for two weeks at a time.’

André met Marjorie when he was 11 and she was 13. ‘She was in a class with my sister, and that was it. I noticed this mass of curls,’ he says now. ‘Every now and then, I saw her, and then at the age of 20 it started again and we were married within nine months.’

Before I boarded my plane to see the real-life fairy-tale existence of a man whose stage show – what with the elaborate taffeta ballgowns, Christmas trees, fake snow, and the almost pantomime camaraderie between the orchestra members and the man himself – creates a fantasy that we are in the 18th century, I had been told in no uncertain terms I would not be allowed access to one of the world’s most envied and elusive women: Mrs André Rieu.