It is customary in Vienna on New Year's Eve to play Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss the younger. In Act III the drunken prison warder Frosch, an actor, improvises contemporary satirical references.
This year, at the Volksoper, his targets included "CIA tours", and the governor of California. Frosch named cell 13, in which the housemaid Adele hides in a ball dress "borrowed" from her employers with her sister Ida, after "the most popular Austrian", Arnold Schwarzenegger, who renounced his citizenship after rejecting pleas and protests from his native homeland against his refusal to commute a death sentence.
The new year is welcomed in to a DIY explosion of fireworks in Stephansplatz, outside the magnificent neo-Gothic town hall and around the city, not without danger to bystanders.
The superb New Year's Day concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikvereinsaal, this year conducted by the Latvian Mariss Janson, was described in one newspaper as Austria's biggest export, with an estimated 60 million viewers in 60 countries. RTÉ has shown it in full for 30 years. Ticket applications are accepted only on one day, January 2nd, for next year.
The philharmonic has a complement of 149 players, required first to have played three years in the Staatsoper orchestra. While 60 per cent of Austria's judges are women, there were still only four women musicians visible on television.
It is said that the devil has the best tunes. Just as Handel's See the Conquering Hero Comes was composed in honour of "butcher" Cumberland, fresh from Culloden in 1746, so the rousing Radetzky March of Johann Strauss the elder, which ends the concert, celebrated the suppression of Italian revolt by Marshal Radetzky in 1849.
It is not exactly a European hymn, but American troops played it when they withdrew in 1955, after the signing of the state treaty which guaranteed Austrian neutrality.
Last year the Second Republic celebrated 50 years of sovereign independence. Nineteen fifty-five also saw the Burgtheater and Staatsoper reopened. The last operatic performance in 1944 under Nazi annexation was Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Beethoven's Fidelio celebrated the rebirth.
No other opera house offers such varied repertoire. About 50 operas are performed each year, plus half a dozen ballets.
The Staatsoper offers a couple of hundred standing places with rails to lean on (currently €2 at the top of the house, €3.50 in the parterre), which are availed of by young people and music-lovers of little means with time to queue on the day. Forty years ago it gave me a wonderful musical education. Perhaps the new Abbey Theatre and Concert Hall might consider the model.
Austria began its second EU presidency on January 1st. A new airport VIP terminal costing €16 million opened for the occasion.
German chancellor Angela Merkel, Slovenian prime minister Janez Jana and EU Commission vice-president Günter Verheugen, guests at the New Year's concert, continued the Diplomatenpolka in the magnificently restored Albertina palace-cum-museum opposite. Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel quipped that he needed "some friends of the presidency".
Despite her rocky path to the chancellery, Angela Merkel has made a good start. She reverted in the EU budget negotiations to the magnanimous approach of Helmut Kohl. She is not attracted to an EU run by big-power concertation, as advocated by French presidential aspirant and interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, nor to the constantly resurfacing idea of an inner circle.
She wants to work with medium and smaller powers, particularly in central and eastern Europe.
Austria was bruised by the EU diplomatic boycott when Schüssel formed a government in 2000 with right-wing liberal party the FPÖ, led then by radical populist Jörg Haider. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was one of the few EU leaders prepared to stay friendly.
The chancellor was thoroughly vindicated. Just as President Mitterrand of France in 1981 took on board the communists, only to squeeze them into insignificance, Schüssel achieved the same feat with Haider, whose new splinter party, the BZÖ, will struggle to exceed the minimum threshold in elections next October.
The whole experience left Schüssel wary of EU attitudes to smaller countries. Significantly, the Green Party claims to be the most pro-EU party in Austria.
Presidency priorities include progressing Balkan EU enlargement, especially Croatia; tackling unemployment, a record 7.2 per cent in Austria, which is not too high by previous European standards; and breathing new life into the EU constitutional treaty, in full or modified form.
The new year did not start entirely smoothly or happily. Part of an advertising campaign to heighten popular EU awareness, not cleared in advance, had to be withdrawn, at some loss to the taxpayer, for presenting well-known international politicians in pornographic poses.
Warning signs of avalanches from rooftops were underlined, when a roof collapsed under the weight of snow in Bavaria, killing 15 people.
The Russian gas dispute with Ukraine, now settled, had strong political undertones, drawing attention to Europe's energy supply vulnerability and assisting those advocating a new generation of nuclear power stations.
This year Austria will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. He disliked his birthplace Salzburg, and its prince archbishop Colloredo, who dismissed him for refusing to be a lowly servant. The film Amadeus is a less reliable guide to Mozart's life even than the Michael Collins film was of his.
Mozart's tragedy was overwork, trying to survive on commissions, having failed to secure a steady position. He had no talent for managing money.
The contrast with the secure job, the support and the creative freedom given by the Esterházys to Haydn, and their care of his memory which enhances their glory, could not be greater.
Mozart's music is sublime. It will be heard round the world this year. Yet he himself was down to earth (putting it mildly) and closer in sympathy to Papageno in The Magic Flute, who is sceptical towards the blind obedience required in the libretto's mumbo-jumbo world of freemasonry in princely battles with the forces of darkness. The Queen of the Night, too, has the best tunes and costume.