New Year’s Day! It’s a joy to reach this auspicious date once again. No matter the day is dismal weather-wise. Grey rain-lashed skies seem even drearier in Italy especially when they’ve carried on since Christmas.

Old traditions continue especially with our luncheon’s fare which consists of lentils – promising prosperity, cotecchino and mashed potatoes – with our favourite wine, of course.

The television is ready to receive the acclaimed New Year’s Day concert from the golden splendour of Vienna Musikverein.

Yet another tradition? Yes…since 1945. Of course, polkas and waltzes, together with those other loved dances the quadrilles and gallops imported from France, have been played to celebrate this festive season since the days of the country landler and the contre-dance… and probably well before then. It was only, however, in that ruined, broken city at the end of the Second World War that the New Year’s concert we know and love, with the obligatory Blue Danube and Radetzky march conclusion, came into being.

A city divided, as Berlin would be until 1990, between east and west occupying forces. A city where Viennese delights like real coffee, sachertorte and Venus’ nipples would be far away and few. A landscape haunted by the likes of Harry Lime delving deep into its sewers with faked drugs. A city attempting to lift itself up and dust itself down after the horror.

But was Vienna ever just a place of champagne frolics, gala waltzing nights, and belle-epoquerie? Of course it was but darkly drenched, like London and Paris and so many other European cities, in poverty, prostitution and profligacy. Courtesans abounded, enflamed by gipsy passions from that other part of the Hapsburg Empire, Hungary. In ‘Die Fledermaus’ Rosalinda, disguised as a countess from the land of the Puszta plains and Tokai wine sings a wonderfully nostalgic Czardas for her country which represents freedom from the court strictures of a more rigid Vienna society.

‘My deceased father would declare: “My mid-wife was the Emperor Franz Joseph”’. An Austrian friend,  a work-colleague in the heady time before the UK shot itself in the foot in the infamous 2016 referendum, told me that that was the way his dad would remind others that he was born when the Hapsburg Empire was still in existence. It was a multi-national empire with Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Italians, Rom and Germans; an empire which stretched from Vienna to Prague to Trieste to Budapest to Sibiu to Lviv (patrimony of UNESCO and now under Russian drone bombardment). The Hapsburg Empire was, though nationalists would dispute it, a precursor to the European Union in its varied ethnicities and, like the EU today, was able to keep its part of Europe away from catastrophic wars and not even engage in colonial enterprises until – of course – a nationalist bullet murdered Franz Ferdinand.

When we undertook a long tour of those countries once comprising the Hapsburg hegemony, just after they had been liberated from the yoke of Soviet control, one of the things we noticed was that, despite the clear distinctions between the various components of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was a sense that they had once formed part of one nation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the architecture of their old buildings, the churches and palaces in particular. It was moving from Transylvania and reaching Bulgaria that we realised we had moved from Mittel-Europ and reached the Ottomans!

(All part of the old Empire but not Austria)

After the disastrous 1919 treaty of Versailles all this was thrown away. New independent nations like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia were formed to assuage the will of folk who wished to reaffirm their nationalism and language. The area of the Hapsburg Empire became reduced to just a small, land-locked rump of a country called the republic of Austria. And after the Anschluss of 1938 it even stopped being an independent nation and became a fragment of an evil empire which succeeded in almost destroying it.

Such are the ways of politics and history. Why are my thoughts distracted by these spectral visions of a different time when I hear the glorious music coming from the Musikverein on New Year’s Day? Why do I not always remember that Johann Strauss himself had to fight to gain his position as the world’s waltz king – and most of all against his father who wished him to become a bureaucrat?

Incidentally one of the most engaging anecdotes I learned about the friendship Johann Strauss had with Johannes Brahms – often regarded by many to have been the successor to Beethoven – tells that Strauss’s wife Adele approached Brahms with a request to autograph her fan. Usually the composer would inscribe some measures of his own music, and then sign his name. Brahms, however, inscribed a few bars from the “Blue Danube”, and wrote beneath it: “Unfortunately, NOT by Johannes Brahms.”

(Johann Strauss and Johannes Brahms at Bad Ischl)

Let’s listen with open heart to the music springing from the aureate shoebox-shaped hall of the Musikverein and be glad that we are still here to enjoy the New Year bathed in its roseate sounds.

(Us at the Musikverein though not on New Year’s Day!)