Film sets Mozart's Magic Flute in trenches of WWI

VENICE, Sep 8 (Reuters) Mozart's ''The Magic Flute'' plays out amid the horrors of World War One in Kenneth Branagh's striking new film, which premieres later in the canal city's famed Teatro La Fenice opera house.

The 27 million dollars production opens with Tamino as a soldier in the trenches and, instead of the snake that almost kills him in the original libretto he is pursued by a trail of mustard gas.

Papageno, the bird catcher, becomes the keeper of canaries used during the war to test for gas and the Queen of the Night's triumphant first appearance is astride a tank.

''I was surprised when I first started listening to it (the opera) of the scale of it, the intensity of it, the drama of it,'' Branagh told reporters yesterday after a press screening of ''The Magic Flute'' at the Venice Film Festival.

''It seemed that in the music there was a kind of plea for peace and it evolved into a sense that perhaps this utterly fascinating and appalling situation of the First World War ... was something where the music could meet and the one not overwhelm the other.'' In the production notes for the film, Branagh also points out that the opera has been given other unusual settings: ''It's been set on the moon, in the circus, at Stonehenge, on the beach, and Mozart can live in all of them,'' he said.

And so Tamino, Papageno and Pamina are caught between fighting factions led by the Queen of the Night and Sarastro in his bombed-out castle.

Computer-enhanced sequences soar over battlefields that conjure up the devastation in northern Europe during World War One and graveyards with row upon row of simple white tombstones that mark the battlefields today.

WIDER AUDIENCE Branagh asked actor Stephen Fry to rework the libretto, originally in German, into English in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Peter Moores, the British businessman and philanthropist who funded the project, said the use of English was a logical step since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself moved away from Italian when he wrote the opera, in order to attract new crowds.

''This (English) is a language that is known in film and on computers and we wanted to do this in English which would be understood throughout the world,'' said Moores, speaking in Italian.

''This was a great way to open up the lyrics and the opera to the wider world.'' Branagh agreed, saying: ''It would be so wonderful if we could get opera goers to come to the cinema and cinema goers to perhaps go to the opera as a result of seeing the film, if either is not something they normally do.'' Moores chose Branagh to direct the project because of his success in transporting theatre to the big screen with productions including ''Much Ado About Nothing'' and ''Hamlet''.

The opera has been adapted for cinema before, as when Ingmar Bergman made a version sung in Swedish. In that version, Sarastro is Pamina's father, a suggestion that also makes its way into Branagh's film.

The official premiere of the out-of-competition film takes place in the opulence of La Fenice, which opened in 1792, the year after The Magic Flute was first performed.

REUTERS PB VV0925