The New Year's Day concert of classical music in Vienna has become an annual tradition - but it's not as old as some expect and there is a dark side to its history.
Twinkling chandeliers hang over the Graben, the avenue that has been Vienna's main shopping street since the 12th Century.
Halfway down, an ornate, baroque, marble and gold column stands in memorial to those who died in the virulent plagues of the 17th Century. Temporary stalls have been set up around the monument, selling mulled wine and sweet cakes.
They are staffed by volunteers from local Lions clubs, that international organisation dedicated to community work. By day, presumably lawyers, accountants, thoroughly modern business people.
But while the men wear warm quilted jackets, the women are in red and white dirndls, the national dress of old Austria.
History is all around here, much more so than in the other capitals of old Europe.
The civic architecture speaks of a city running a vast empire. The grand palaces that are now hotels and shopping arcades were once the townhouses of a noble and rich aristocracy.
The power may have gone but the past is ever present - in cafes that have been serving coffee since Mozart lived here, at the Spanish Riding School - where once young army officers practiced dressage, at the dancing academies preparing the city's youth for the annual ball season.
You could be forgiven for assuming that the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Day concert is also part of this roll-call of tradition.
The annual performance of waltzes, polkas and marches by Johann Strauss, his three sons and their contemporaries, seems timeless.
Everything about the event, from its formality, its charmingly contrived humour, its home in the almost overpoweringly rich Golden Hall of the Musikverein, suggest something that dates back to the heady days of the 19th Century.
In fact the history of the New Year's Day concert is rather more recent. It was a Nazi invention.
The first ever performance took place on New Year's Eve 1939, raising money for the Winterhilfswerk, an annual fundraising drive masterminded by the National Socialist Party to buy fuel for the needy in the coldest months of the year.
When the Strausses were alive, the Vienna Philharmonic was a little sniffy about their music. Why would such an advanced and adventurous orchestra want to play popular tunes?
They started taking it more seriously in the late 1920s - but the idea of a seasonal Strauss gala really gained traction when the Nazi party's cultural commissars hit upon the idea of a unifying event that could be broadcast live across the Third Reich. The concert moved to New Year's Day in 1941.http://cricketnewsartical.blogspot.com/
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