Jesse and Karol Teiko with the Metropolitan Opera’s Music Director James Levine (center).

Jesse and Karol Teiko have shared everything for the last 40 years, and for the past 3, that has included a view of the Red Rocks Amphitheater from their apartment home at Wind Crest.

This is the second place they decided to retire to, and this time—unlike the Denver weather that is known to change every ten minutes—it’s sticking.

The Teikos lived in New Jersey but spent winters in Florida for more than 20 years. When it came time to settle down, they decided to do so in the place they had nestled during the cold winter months. However, Florida summers are much different than winters there, and it only took one summer for the Teikos to know that the humid environment was not the right place for them. And although the snowbirds had purposefully avoided winters for two decades, they realized they were missing the beauty of the snow. So, in 2006, they decided to revise their retirement plan.

Karol Teiko with Spanish conductor Placido Domingo.

Mrs. Teiko had three parameters for deciding where to land. First, the location had to have four seasons. She grew up in Vermont and spent all of her life on the East Coast. Mr. Teiko was born in New York City and spent more than 60 years actively working as a musician for the Metropolitan Orchestra in the Big Apple. So both of them needed variety. The second condition was that they get at least 2,000 miles closer to Mrs. Teiko’s children and their four grandchildren, who are all in California. And the final parameter was that the humidity had to be low, especially in the summertime. “If all of those things were met, I would be a happy camper, and they were, so we are delighted,” Mrs. Teiko says.

The Teikos had been on the priority list (in line for an apartment home) at Seabrook, an Erickson community in New Jersey, but “the apartment was ready before we were,” Mr. Teiko says. When they found out about Wind Crest, they flew out to Denver to see what the campus had to offer. They wanted a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment home but none were available, so originally, they were going to wait. As fate would have it, an apartment that fit their needs opened up, with a balcony and a view of the gorgeous Colorado mountains. The Teikos took the apartment without even seeing it (though they had seen the model when they visited), and they haven’t doubted their decision one bit.

When things worked out for their move to Wind Crest, it wasn’t the first time the stars aligned for the Teikos. One might say it was fate that caused them to meet in the first place.

Summer camp changes life

When they first crossed paths, Mrs. Teiko was working as a research chemist for the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health near Washington, D.C. Mr. Teiko was an established double-bass musician in New York City (a graduate of Juilliard, he played at the Met, for the New York City Ballet, and on Broadway). By chance, he was teaching at a summer music camp in Reston, Va., where Mrs. Teiko was living. Mrs. Teiko was friends with the director of the camp because she sang in choruses “as a hobby,” but deep down, singing was her true love. And once she met Mr. Teiko, he swept her away from the world of science and immersed her in art and music, and she’s never looked back. They were married six months after they met.

Mrs. Teiko wanted to sing more than anything and Mr. Teiko recognized the value of his wife’s voice, so he spoke to the Met’s choral director and said that she wanted to audition. The choral director was encouraging, but he didn’t want to know who she was when she auditioned. So she went in blind, and the director wanted to hire her full-time on the spot, not knowing who she was. But Mrs. Teiko had four little ones at home, so she took a seasonal contract instead. “It was like a great big, giant fat plum fell in my lap when they gave me a job at the opera house,” she says. After the kids were grown and once she had been singing part-time in the Met chorus for ten years, she knew she was ready to sing full-time.

And the rest, as they say, is history, or rather, his and her story.

When they reminisce about their working relationship together, the Teikos’ voices are filled with love. They had separate car pools from New Jersey to New York—she rode with the chorus and he rode with the orchestra. It’s evident from how they talk about one another that they are each other’s biggest fans, and being at Wind Crest only expands the horizons of the life they share.