Your best foot forward

LEARNING to waltz like the Austrians for the Mozart festival was a big step for Kevin Pilley.

THE Austrians claim they can teach anyone and anything to dance.

At Vienna's Spanish Riding School they have even managed to train Lippanzen horses to do the paso doble. So a congenitally uncoordinated non-Austrian couple, masquerading as Mr and Mrs Mozart for the weekend, shouldn't have presented much of a problem.

Every year, between New Year's Eve and Lent, the great and the good, the chinless and chinned, the elegant and the ungainly all descend on Vienna, the city of music, romance and Sigmund Freud to act out their dreams of grandeur by gliding over expanses of polished parquet under glittering chandeliers to one of Johann Strauss's most melodious ditties.

Once considered so indecently erotic and vulgar its teachers were hunted down as perverts by the church, it is now considered rather indecent and uncouth not to know how to "step, side and together".

Two hundred high-society waltzing balls comprise Vienna's annual seven-week feast and the city's 30 dance schools now offer refresher courses, and special weekend ball-going breaks for beginners.

Waltzing, a German concept, goes back to the 13th century but didn't become fashionable until the early 19th. The first Viennese Opera Ball was held in 1873 in the Musikverein. The first Ball in the Opera House (opened in 1863) was in 1935. It is now the highlight of the historic Viennese ball season.

Carnuntum, a few kilometres downstream along the Danube, was the scene of the Roman winter saturnalia when all distinctions of rank and status were temporarily forgotten.

Today the same democratic principle survives with commoners rubbing shoulders on the dance floor with the well-heeled aristocracy.

Some 3500 people paying $500 a ticket for the opulent Opera Ball which sold out months in advance. The other major event is The Emperor's Ball staged in the Hofburg Palace, the former imperial residence.

However, every profession or guild in Vienna has its own ball. There is a taxi drivers' ball, a sugarmakers' ball, a bankers' ball, a bakers' ball, a postmen's ball and even a chimneysweeps' ball.

Black tails for the gentlemen and white dresses with long white gloves for the ladies are de rigeur although authentic period costume right down to the buckled shoes and powdered Tibetan ox hair wig can be hired. As we did.

For no reason apart from wanting to make fools ourselves we went as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mrs Mozart.

We weren't alone. A lot of frustrated composers come out of the closet in Vienna in January.

Converted from the Palais Wurtenberg in 1873 by Emperor Franz Josef and still the residence of visiting dignitaries and crowned heads of state, the Imperial Hotel on Vienna's central boulevard , Ringstrasse, was our training camp.

In between "Imperial tortes" (a speciality of almonds and chocolates) and "Knapfen Fasching" (an apricot pastry) we practised oursuperior sneers and killing looks on the Imperial's Grand Staircase, worked on our Habsburgian hauteur in its gilded ballroom and put finishing touches to our formal Viennese hand kisses and courtly bows in the stately Marble Room.

My wife's asphyxiating late eighteenth century stays and my cummerband caused whistling intakes of breath with every movement.

For an hour Herr Ellmayer, who runs Vienna's top dance school and who taught Dallas's JR, Larry Hagman to dance, patiently corrected our posture and counted us around the room.

My wife looked like one of those Prussian archduchesses who had 18 children and she felt like she was pregnant with all of them. We were meant to float with grace and dignity, but catching sight of ourselves in the studio's wrap-around mirror, we looked more like two television Daleks spinning out of control in their final death throes.

Herr Ellmayer assured us that ballroom skills were not the exclusive monopoly of central Europeans and after practice – he didn't say how many years or how tightly I should tie my wife's legs to mine – our stiffness and self-consciousness would disappear.

The fact that Strauss, who composed some 470 waltzes, couldn't waltz himself was some consolation as we headed to our ball.

Unfortunately, the taxi proved too small for one bewigged Mozart and his XL codpiece and so I had to make my own way. By foot.

I ended up well off course in Prater Park where I was heckled and subjected to demeaning wolf whistles.

I was accosted by two buskers who wanted me to conduct them in a special gala performance of Wiener Blut and I was further delayed by numerous tourists who, believing Mozart had risen from his grave in St Marx cemetery, wanted a snapshot. I was also mobbed by crows mistaking my periwig for a nest.

Arriving at the ball two hours late, at the express wish of the balls of my feet, liver and badly ruched codpiece, I sat on the sidelines watching my wife being whisked around by a succession of suave and maddeningly balanced obviously Austrian men on casters.

I sat it out and drank my champagne in time to the music. In the morning, I must admit, I did have a Viennese whirl.