GOOD news in time for Mozart’s 250th birthday next month: listening to his music, according to the latest research, boosts IQ, squeezes more milk out of cows and makes rats more loveable.

Judging by the frenzied commerce in the narrow streets of his birthplace, Salzburg, it also makes the cash tills ring.

Austria is gearing up for a year-long celebration of its best-known composer. With 500 events planned for 2006, it hopes to use Mozart to rebrand itself as a serious European player, the place where the big issues of European identity can be hammered out.

“During our EU presidency, starting in January, we want to get to grips with some of the deep reflection about the continent that was neglected in the British stint,” one senior official said. “Mozart Year is the perfect moment.”

One of the first Mozart Year visitors to Salzburg will be Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, who will be attending a brainstorming session entitled The Sound of Europe. Whether the accomplished pianist will be impressed by Salzburg’s avalanche of Mozart kitsch — Mozart knickers are flying off the shelves, as well as a bra that plays a refrain from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik — is another matter. Mozart’s two children died without offspring: there is no family to protect or profit from the Mozart name and so the free market is running wild. There are beer glasses that trill a few notes from The Marriage of Figaro when full, there is a Mozart sausage and Mozart babysuits. You can get drunk on Mozart schnapps and fat on sticky chocolate Mozart Balls, then you can jog it all off in Mozart jogging pants.

By that time, you may be ready to listen to some music. “It will be an artistic feast,” says Inge Brodil, a former set designer who is helping to co-ordinate the programme for the Mozart Year. Salzburg alone will host 260 concerts and 55 masses. “For the first time, all 22 of Mozart’s operas will be staged,” Frau Brodil says.

In line with Austria’s new image, there will be plenty of experimentation during the year. The German director Doris Doerrie has been allowed to take on Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera. Critics are already nervous: they still remember how she staged Verdi’s Rigoletto, in the manner of Planet of the Apes.

The tone has been struck by the Texan avant-garde artist Robert Wilson (designer of Death, Destruction and Detroit) who has recast Mozart’s handsome ochre-painted birthplace in the Getreidegasse. A stunted doll of the wigged, dead Mozart has been embedded in a cot, a blue neon halo dangling overhead. A baffled Italian visitor shielded his child’s eyes, saying it was a horror show. “I think it’s just there to frighten children,” said Sandro Brunetti, from Turin.

Austria proposes to “Europeanise” Mozart and Frau Brodil has been networking with other cities, including Prague and London. The country is taking a more distanced view of its local heroes. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born Governor of California, is being disowned by his hometown of Graz. After he signed the death warrant on a reformed murderer, Graz decided to rename its Arnold Schwarzenegger football stadium and find another tourist attraction. There is not much chance that Salzburg will ever banish the name of Mozart.

A LIFE IN MUSIC

He died on December 5, 1791, from a fever