Is Norman Bethune's legacy too big for opera?

[Minstrel Boy]

Is Norman Bethune's legacy too big for opera?

The Globe and Mail, Jan 22

Opera loves a heroic story, unless it's modern. We still haven't had a decent opera about Lech Walesa, or Martin Luther King (a chamber opera, apparently the first, flamed out in Memphis last fall), or Norman Bethune, known to a billion Chinese and some Canadians as the most heroic figure this country has ever produced.

Bethune's story certainly looks stage-worthy. An idealistic preacher's son from Gravenhurst, Ont., becomes a pioneering surgeon, social crusader and front-line activist in the fight against fascism. He runs stretchers for the Canadian medical corps during the First World War, dresses wounds for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and builds an innovative model hospital in China during the Japanese invasion. He dies in action at a field hospital, and is apotheosized as a "martyr" by Mao Zedong in one of the most widely read texts of the Maoist era.

Maybe the story is too big, too operatic in the old-fashioned sense. Tim Brady would seem to think so, although his options for what appears to be the first opera about Bethune were constrained by the absence of an opera company willing to take on the project.

Brady's Three Cities in the Life of Dr. Norman Bethune, which receives its first Toronto performances this weekend at the Music Gallery, is in some ways an anti-opera. The big story happens off-stage, away from the framing texts and implied evolution of character that goes on within Brady's sparse monodrama for baritone and chamber ensemble.

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A couple of things Dr Bethune said:

"Charity should be abolished and be replaced by justice"

"I refuse to live in a world that spawns murder and corruption withoutraising my hand against them. I refuse to condone, by passivity, or by default, the wars which greedy men make against others..."


From a biographical sketch by Citizenship and Immigration Canada:

While in Montréal, Norman noticed a worrying tendency. A significant number of the needier patients he treated had to be readmitted to hospital because they caught tuberculosis again. He linked this phenomenon to the unhealthy conditions their poverty obliged them to live in, and became convinced that destitution was the real source of this disease. Tuberculosis, he decided, could not be combated with surgery alone. Instead, he formed a society of medical professionals called the Montréal Group for the Security of People's Health to lobby the Canadian government for socialized health care.

Bethune also spoke up in favour of equality between men and women before this was an accomplished fact in Canada. In his words, "Women have been slaves too long. I am tired of idiots who try to keep 'explaining' the female mind. The female mind is the human mind. Under inhuman conditions it will suffer. The myths created about the so-called female mind are kept alive by men who want to keep women in bondage."

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Bethune was asked to head a medical team there. The world-class thoracic surgeon gave up some of his high-paying jobs at various institutions to accept. In Spain, he began a mobile blood transfusion service to deliver blood from donors to soldiers engaged in battle. He put his life on the line several times to make sure that the transfusion service reached the troops.

In January 1938, after his return from Spain, Norman journeyed to China to help the country to defend herself against the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War. He trained thousands of Chinese as medics and doctors, and his mobile blood unit saved the lives of countless soldiers. Tragically, Bethune died there on November 12, 1939. He had contracted blood poisoning from a cut sustained during an operation. His body was taken to the city of Shih Cha Chuang, near Beijing, to be buried in the Mausoleum of Martyrs, a building that houses the portraits of China's best-known heroes. Bethune's statue and portrait remain there on display. The Bethune Medical School and the Bethune International Peace Hospital were later built in Shih Cha Chuang as a tribute to Bethune. Mao Tse-Tung praised the Canadian surgeon highly. "We mourn more than the passing of a man," he said. "Dr. Bethune's devotion to the people is a lesson for all. (He was) a man of importance, integrity, of virtue, who forsook self-interest for the interest of the people. The death of comrade Bethune is a great bereavement. The Chinese nation will recall him with love and admiration."

In 1973, the Canadian government bought the Gravenhurst house where Norman was born. It is now Bethune Memorial House and stands as a reminder of this Canadian's self-sacrifice and humanitarian actions. Further, York University in Toronto named one of its colleges in honour of the great surgeon. And in 1997, The Royal Canadian Mint and The China Gold Coin Incorporation released two silver coins to commemorate the Canadian's outstanding life and work.
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