Opera, dictators, and Wismut uranium tailings cleanup: untold stories for the ages

A weekend of opera.  Saturday morning’s five-hour-long Tristan and Isolde live from the Met by high definition satellite to the local cinema.   A feast of splendor about love induced by lust and potion–with all the emotions that betrayal and adultery attend. 

Dreseden Opera House –  Photo by By Uncle Budda — see flickr.  

Then in the evening to a local live production by the Vancouver opera of Beethoven’s Fidelio.  Beethoven, fearing the censor, placed the tale of scrapping politicians in far-away Seville in a long-past century.  It could though be going on even now in South America–Cuba for example.  Falling foul of a rival politician, the hero is thrust into an illegal prison; his wife and a change of regime save him to much glorious music.  The local opera company, as is the unfortunate habit of politically-motivated, politically-correct directors–a curse on them–transposed the action to Berlin just before and after the fall of the Wall.

Which reminded me of my own trips to that land behind the Wall after its fall.  I went twice to see Wismut and the cleanup of the uranium mines that the Russians had developed to get uranium for the cold war.   What had been in the early 1900s a thriving Jewish textile community was taken over by the Nazis because of its beautiful setting and lovely houses.  The Nazi out, the Russians came in and fenced off a huge area and promptly moved into the lovely houses while they mined and spread wastes far and wide. 

With the fall of the Wall, the West Germans came in to remediate and clean up.  The story is nowhere well told in English–there are a number of very German-precise, German language conference proceedings telling of the enormous works and monies spent to restore the area–still not complete.  There are one or two web sites that sketch activities for brief interest. Find them via Google. 

I went primarily to see how they put covers on the uranium mill tailings impoundment, the upper surface of which was a very soft, unconsolidated near-slurry.  The standard practice that has worked well is to lay down a geotextile, then a geogrid, install wick drains, and then place about 300-mm of sand–measure consolidation and then place more soils to form an evapotranspirative cover. 

The journey took us through Dresden–devastated and depressing.  All that remained of its former glory was the old opera house, sitting proud in a square near the river.  The Russians did little but build repetitive concrete block apartments and place a hideous statue of the head of Karl Marx in the city center.

So I took to another opera this evening on DVD from Parma.  This is one we will never see in North America; for how could you deal with the politically incorrect anti-Muslim story that reflects the fight of the Austrian Empire with the Turks?   I refer to Verdi’s Il Corsaro.  Maybe I am being unfair, for the story is once again one of the triumph of love and music in the face of political insanity; here is the briefest precise I could find

The Greek Corsair Corrado manages to infiltrate the camp of the Turks, commanded by the pasha Seid. He is disguised and is not recognised, but his corsairs attack the camp before he gives the signal. He is wounded, discovered and arrested. Gulnara, one of Seid’s concubines, saves him. But when the Corsair finally manages to return to his island refuge, he finds his beloved Medora dying of grief: the false news of his death had arrived before him. Corrado, overcome, throws himself into the sea and disappears among the billowing waves.  

There are no lessons in this for anyone, except that I am now involved in replicating the Wismut approach on a site here in North America and that is why I posted little on this blog last week.

Or maybe the lessons are so obvious that we should not spell them out: the bad effects of mining in the absence of the rule of law; the devastation wrought by overlords in a foreign country; racialism in pursuit of wealth however gotten; the fickleness of politicians not beholden to an electorate; the power of love; and the heroism of the common man in the face of tyrants.