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Since he lived in the middle of town he went about his work as quietly as possible. Even his landlady’s curious ears usually only detected him pacing around the room and humming to himself. One day a Viennese pianist named Fritzi Braun, also staying in the house, ran into Brahms on the street and he inquired, “So how’s it going?” Very well, she replied politely, and how is it with you? “Me?” said Brahms mysteriously. “These days it can only go for me as it does with you, in fact only exactly as it does with you.” After watching her gape at that, he revealed the meaning of his riddle. The day before he had come upon two women standing in front of the house listening to Frau Fritzi’s excellent piano playing, and he heard one whisper excitedly to the other, “Do you hear? Brahms is playing.” From then on Brahms called Fritzi his “Doppelgängerin,” his lady double.25 He probably had in mind a comic mirror of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” in which the poet sees his double anguishing before an old lover’s house. For himself, Brahms was not going to be caught entertaining passersby.

At Mürzzuschlag that summer he completed the first two movements of the Fourth Symphony. This would be no single season’s job, like the last two symphonies. He was excruciatingly aware that the new one would be compared to the Third and its instant popularity. Surely it occurred to him that it had been a long time since he had suffered a fiasco, and maybe he was overdue.

Much of his socializing in Mürzzuschlag was with the Fellingers, husband Richard another prosperous, music-loving industrialist, wife Maria a painter, sculptor, and photographer—and to Brahms’s equal pleasure, a Hausfrau who cooked a marvelous Metzelsuppe (a Swabian peasant dish) and knitted him the kind of socks his mother used to. Frau Maria made many of the pile of silk neckties that now reside in a glass case in the Mürzzuschlag Brahms Museum. He had met the Fellingers shortly after they came to Vienna in 1881. Maria’s mother had been admired—by Mendelssohn among others—for singing her own songs to her own accompaniment, and her father was a professor at Tübingen who wrote poetry as “Christian Reinhold.” Brahms set several Reinholds to music.

As much as the Fellingers senior, Brahms enjoyed their two girls and boy. He was happy to get down on the floor and play with all his friends’ children, basking in their cries of “Onkel Bahms!” In Mürzzuschlag as in Vienna and other towns where he stayed, every street urchin knew him, the short fat man who always had candy and little toys for them in the pockets of his shabby black waistcoat. He would hold up treats and let them jump for them, or shove into their mouths what looked like a river pebble and beam at their delight when they discovered it was sugar candy.

Sunday dinner with the Fellingers became one of his most reliable rituals. To Maria we owe paintings and busts of Brahms, and many candid photos from the last decade of his life. Brahms and the Fellingers would have one of the most untroubled of his friendships—and as with Widmann and most of the other relatively untroubled ones, Brahms and the Fellingers never used the familiar du. Usually his Duzenbrüder were the ones he bruised most.

Brahms took the train back over the Semmering Pass to Vienna in mid-October and prepared for his winter tours. That autumn he collected funds from friends to give Theodor Kirchner, who was declining in fortune and spirits. Kirchner had always been depressive, but now his health was broken and the vogue for his little keyboard pieces long past. Maybe he spent his dotage brooding about Clara, their long-ago affair. It was that year when Clara, contemplating his decline, wrote the veiled, melancholy reminiscence in her journal: “I wished to make one so highly gifted into a worthy man and artist.… It was a sad experience. I suffered much.”26

During the 1884–5 concert season, Brahms appeared several times with Hans von Bülow and the Meiningen Court Orchestra. In December he went to Oldenburg