The end of 2007 is upon us! Hard to believe, isn't it?

You can find plenty of New Year's Eve playlists if you search online, many of them compilations of the best and/or most popular songs of 2007. (Not necessarily the same thing, heh!)

I wanted to do something more, shall we say, timeless. That's a fancy way of saying that I bounce around on the continuum from hipster to old fogy, so I'll leave the current lists to those who are more up-to-the-minute than I am! Anyway, here are some selections that fit the topic of New Year's, or related topics like 1) the passing of time and 2) drinking (please do it responsibly!).

Les Classiques:

Here are a couple of operas that are traditionally performed around New Year's. Neither of them has anything directly to do with the holiday, although one of the plots does center around a raging party.

Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel is based on the familiar fairy tale, which never really seemed like a nice little children's story to me, but then many of those old fairy tales are kind of dark and twisted if you take a close look at them. An aria from the opera that might be familiar is Gretel's "Brüderchen, komm tanz' mit mir" ("Brother, come and dance with me").

Now, about that party - Die Fledermaus, by Johann Strauss II, features lots of good old-fashioned champagne-soaked fun, including the mistaken identities, extracurricular flirtation, practical jokes and payback for same, and sassy servants-smarter-than-their-masters hijinks that you expect from our venerable operatic/theatrical canon.

I was lucky enough to attend a performance of Fledermaus at the Met in New York while I lived there. It's traditional to cast a well-known comedian or other celebrity in the non-singing role of Frosch, the jailer. Dom Deluise was the guest star in the performance I saw, and he was given numerous chances for campy comedic improvisation. Opera purists surely cringed, but it was fun to watch.

You can start your countdown during the day with "Dance of the Hours," a ballet sequence from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. If you've seen Disney's Fantasia, you'll recognize the music, one section of which is impossible to listen to without hearing the goofy song that's stolen from based on it: Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah."