Schloss Esterházy

A Gothic castle stood on the site from the thirteenth century, held by the Gutk family, owners of numerous estates in western Hungary. In 1364 the powerful Kanizsai family acquired it and built generously, and with the permission of the Hungarian king Louis the Great they threw a wall around the whole town of Eisenstadt, folding the castle into the town's defences. Between 1445 and 1464 castle and town passed to the Lower Austrian chamber administration, which merely pledged the castle onward, so no rebuilding was done; the reconciliation of Emperor Frederick III with the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus later returned the town, with all of western Hungary as it then was, to the Hungarian crown for a time.

The Esterházys arrived by treaty, not conquest. In 1622 the castle came into the family's administration as a pledge — compensation agreed after the Peace of Nikolsburg, under which Count Nikolaus Esterházy ceded the lordship of Munkács to Gábor Bethlen. In 1649 Nikolaus's son Ladislaus bought the castle outright from Ferdinand III, and it has stood in unbroken Esterházy ownership ever since.

Ladislaus fell at the battle of Vezekény in 1652, and the palace passed to his younger brother Paul. Between 1663 and 1672 Paul I had the medieval castle rebuilt as a baroque palace to plans by Carlo Martino Carlone, with stonework contracted to the masters of Kaisersteinbruch and rich stucco by the Italian Andrea Bertinalli; the works still outstanding were stalled by the Turkish siege of 1683. It remained one of the principal residences and the administrative centre of the family — soon raised to princely rank — for three hundred years. The eighteenth century changed little outside: hard Kaiserstein was delivered in 1745–46 for the stone bridge over the moat, and Johann Michael Strickner supplied the new main staircase in 1761.

Joseph Haydn served the Esterházy court from 1761 to 1803 as court musician, Kapellmeister and composer, directing more than a thousand performances; many of his works were composed and premiered here. The great hall built under Paul I — three storeys high, spanning most of the north wing — carries frescoes attributed to the seventeenth-century painter Carpoforo Tencalla, telling the story of Cupid and Psyche, with the armorial bearings of the Esterházys interspersed between them, while wall medallions painted by the court painter in 1793 portray Hungarian monarchs from Stephen I to Emperor Leopold I. Since the mid-twentieth century the hall has been known as the Haydnsaal.

Nikolaus II set out to remake the baroque palace in classical style, engaging the French architect Charles Moreau, whose plans were executed from 1805 to 1815 by Karl Ehmann. The moat was filled in, and a monumental garden entrance rose on twenty Corinthian columns. But Moreau had planned a princely residence more than twice the size of what stands: the Napoleonic occupation of Eisenstadt broke off the works, and the war's cost to the Esterházy finances — on top of the prince's mistresses, his art-buying and his revival of Haydn's musical establishment — meant they were never resumed, even by later generations. Only the central block was completed, the grand entrance left orphaned while the main door still faces the town, where it always was.

After the Second World War part of the Burgenland state government was housed in the palace during the occupation years, and from 1969 the province leased large parts of the building; that lease ended on 31 December 2009. The palace now belongs to the foundation created by Melinda Esterházy (1920–2014) and is run as a museum and concert venue — the Haydn Festival was held at the palace from 1989 to 2016, succeeded from 2017 by the Herbstgold festival. A full restoration of the roofscape, completed in 2021, renewed all four towers, the balustrades and onion domes, and returned the portals to their original baroque positions.