The core of the old city is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it has a high number of buildings with fantastic filigree. The ornate Spanish Riding School is perhaps the best example, but it has rivals.

Now, I admit there’s something odd in complaining about Vienna. It’s rather like whining that vintage champagne is too sour or too fizzy, or grilled steak too tender; most people are happy to taste it anyway. And I can’t object to Vienna the way I do to (let’s say) Buffalo NY, or Winslow, Arizona, the latter of which pair does not deserve to have had an Eagles song mention it in the lyrics. It’s just that, like vintage champagne, I expect Vienna to be so over the top that the fact of how prosaic it often is becomes a major letdown.

My first visit four years ago showed me many streets that, while their buildings were elegant, had remarkably flat facades. On many blocks, there seemed no indentation anywhere deeper than eight inches. The sense of blandness with ornamentation as a deceptive compensation was inescapable. Admittedly, the Ottoman Turks’ repeated attempts to take the city resulted in most older structures being destroyed, so that today’s ‘old’ city is scarcely more ancient than the oldest parts of Toronto. The 18th Century valued elegance above solidity, and I find the arts of that era tend to set my teeth on edge. But France, England and other countries managed 18th Century buildings with more moulding, and more contour.

Everywhere in central Vienna the music of Strauss, Snr. or Jnr., is heard, with that of Mozart, the favourite adopted son, being the ‘upscale’ second choice. The pleasant hotel where I stayed had a Strauss tape or CD on repeat so that the same selection of six Straussian hits was played in its entirety every 25 minutes. I knew I’d sat too long at breakfast if I heard the Emperor Waltz twice through. If I’d had to work there, I would have gone psycho after a few days of repetitive um-tee-TUM, um-tee-TUM.

Curiously, the city’s other great adopted son, Beethoven, is much less heard. There are two dozen addresses that can lay claim to being Beethoven’s home, since he quarrelled to soften with his neighbours and landlords that he had to keep moving. I started to wonder, when one of these residences was pointed out to me, whether his quarrels actually arose out of frustration with the Viennese reluctance to engage openly with the darker side of life his own music could evoke so well.

Which brings me back to the chocolate. The Italians can really capture the bitter of goodness of chocolate, as can the French. Even the cautious Swiss grasp that cocoa butter needs to express its less friendly side. But I have never eaten a dessert in Austria that tasted of bitter chocolate, or even one containing sharp, acidic fruit. All the chocolate is milk, and the sweetness becomes cloying.

Thus Beethoven, who could wrench chord sequences from his gut, was an odd fit. The city is proud of him, but is more comfortable listening to the Waltz King(s) or the umpty-tiddly-deediddly of Mozart. Sigmund Freud, whose actual theories, with every passing year, strike me as nuttier than any of his patients, makes more sense as you try to find the underbelly of Vienna. He sought to articulate the disowned side of the Viennese character, while the existing distorted self-perception of his patients meant they couldn’t necessarily feed him their secrets in a way that could help him form a more coherent set of psychological ideas.

I don’t know how much the loss of the imperial past has affected Austria and its capital. A century ago, the Hapsburgs ruled much of the Balkans, and parts of Poland, Hungary and today's Czech and Slovak republics. Their palaces, which today are museums, now sit at the heart of a nation of just eight million people. The English and French managed a less sudden decline, as well as retaining at least supporting-actor roles in world affairs, while the Germans (who weren’t even one nation 150 years ago) preside over an economic colossus, if not a political one. Losing the wars you start does have drawbacks in that way.

The Austrians are simply surrounded by what was, and can’t do much. They fear ethnic dilution or assimilation, and they need old Vienna to remind them, and their immigrants, of who they’ve been; or at least, until Freud, of who they thought they were. But they hope to do this without rancour or confrontation: their personal architecture, they hope, will avoid deep, shadowing indentations.

They will continue to avoid dark chocolate.