Love moves a mountain
QUESTION Does anyone remember a Forties or Fifties British black-andwhite film about a composer who dies in an accident on a trip to the Alps?
This was the British romantic drama The Glass Mountain, starring Michael Denison, his wife Dulcie Gray and Valentina Cortese. it was directed by henry Cass and released on March 9, 1949. however, the composer does not die.
The Glass Mountain was filmed in the Dolomites in italy and at La Fenice opera house in Venice, whose orchestra and chorus featured in the cast along with Tito Gobbi, the much-admired operatic baritone, who played himself.
The plot concerns a World War ii RAF pilot, Richard Wilder, who is an unsuccessful composer. his plane is shot down over the Dolomites and he is found unconscious in the snow by a local girl, Alida (Valentina Cortese), who nurses him back to health. she tells him of the local legend of two lovers, one of whom is a ghost who leads her faithless lover to his death on Glass Mountain.
The war over, Richard returns home to his loving wife Anne (Dulcie Gray) and starts composing an opera about the legend of Glass Mountain.
Richard travels to italy, back to Alida. Tito Gobbi tells the Teatro La Fenice about the unfinished opera and they are eager to perform it.
Anne asks her friend Charles to fly her to Venice to the premiere of Richard’s opera, La Montagna di Cristallo (The Glass Mountain). On the way, their plane crashes on Glass Mountain.
Richard conducts the opera himself, to great acclaim. Alida tells him about Anne, and he realises he has to choose between the two women.
Alida says goodbye and Richard hurries to the mountain to meet the rescue party. The doctor tells Richard that though Anne is badly injured, she will recover. The theme music by Nino Rota was a hit and the film was so popular it was rereleased in 1950 and 1953.
Margaret Archard, Coalville, Leics.
QUESTION If the Severn Barrier were built, would it be a cheaper source of power than wind and solar farms?
PLANs for an energy-generating barrage across the severn Estuary have been on and off the table since the Thirties.
The severn Estuary has the secondhighest rise and fall of tide in the world. if a barrage were to be built along a line from Lavernock Point in Wales to Brean in England, this would capture an area at high tide of 200 square miles.
Following the Government-funded severn Tidal Power Feasibility study (2008-10), it was conservatively calculated a barrage would generate 15.6 terawatt hours per annum — 5 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, equivalent to 18 million tons of coal or three nuclear reactors.
however, they concluded that a tidal power scheme in the severn estuary would cost as much as £34 billion.
This makes it high cost and high risk in comparison with other ways of generating low-carbon electricity.
The cost of renewables is dropping rapidly. The Department for Business, Energy and industrial strategy publishes regular estimates of electricity generation sources. The average cost of generating electricity from large-scale onshore wind is £62 per megawatt hour (MWh), with offshore being £102 per MWh.
Onshore wind energy is cheaper than natural gas (£66 per MWh) and nuclear (£93 per MWh). solar is £80 per MWh. At current estimates, energy from the tidal estuary would be in the region of £300 per MWh, five times that of onshore wind farms.
Wind power generated a record 14.7 per cent of the country’s electricity demand in 2017, with solar at 6 per cent.
however, the severn barrage is not dead in the water. some private firms estimate it might generate 30 terawatt hours per annum and so the idea would be well worth revisiting.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow.
QUESTION Does the word nail, the thing on the end of our fingers, have the same origin as nail, the thing that fixes wood together?
ThE connection is an ancient one. The indo-European ancestor of the word nail was nogh- or onogh-. The latter was the source of Latin unguis (which evolved into French ongle and italian unghia and has given English ungulate, which means a mammal with hoofs) and Greek onux (source of the English onyx).
The Germanic branch of the family, which has come from nogh- through a prehistoric Germanic naglaz and the Old English naegl, has differentiated into a fastening pin, originally of wood, latterly of metal. But it also gives us the English nail (Handnaegl), German nagel and Danish negl.
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