By Linda Arntzenius 

Photography by Andrew Wilkinson

“Music for a while, shall all your care’s beguile.” – Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

If the life story of accomplished musicians Carmen and Cezar Mateiescu was presented as an opera it would surely be styled as an Elizabethan romance, complete with cruel tyrant, divided and re-united lovers, and a long sojourn in the Holy Land, where he works as a carpenter against a backdrop of monasteries and rose gardens, and she gives birth to their first son in Nazareth. Far-fetched? Not one bit. more