Alle diese Musenjünger aber waren, wie Frau Marie Lorenz, ein Schwägerin Krzyzanowskis, an Göllerich schreibt, „wie Brüder untereinander‟. Wolf stellte damals die Lieder, die „jener andere‟ (gemeint ist jedenfalls Mahler) Frau Lorenz gewidmet hat, weit höher als seine eigenen Kompositionen.

All these votaries of the muses [Mahler, Rudolf Krzyzanowski and Wolf] were, as Frau Marie Lorenz, a sister-in-law of Krzyzanowski wrote to Göllerich 'like brothers' together'. Wolf at that time placed the songs which the 'other one' (Mahler, no doubt, is meant) had dedicated to Frau Lorenz, far higher than his own compositions.

Auer may have misunderstood Frau Lorenz's letter and he certainly misattributed the songs. The title page of the autograph manuscript of the five songs by Rudolf Krzyzanowski  is dedicated in his hand to 'Meiner lieben, lieben Marie / 5 Lieder von Ihren / Rudolf',  and the dedication also appears in both the copyist's manuscripts.  On fol. 8v of the complete copy of the collection in A-Wn, Heinrich Tschuppik, Rudolf Krzyzanowski's nephew, supplied a not wholly accurate annotation (dated Zürich, 7 September 1949 [possibly corrected from 1947]):

Die Widmung besieht sich auf seine damalige Braut Marie Lorenz.

The dedication refers to his then fiancée, Marie Lorenz.

Although she was never engaged to Rudolf, it seems quite possible that these are the songs referred to in Marie Lorenz's letter to Göllerich.¹ If so, they are one manifestation of the involvement of Rudolf and his brother – the author Heinrich Krzyzanowski (1855–1933) – and three Tschuppik sisters. The details of the – in some respects, unconventional – arrangements are narrated and documented in HBRKMM, and are summarised, with additional details, in Fig. 1:²

Fig. 1: Krzyzanowski-Tschuppik relationships

 

The sisters' father, Friedrich Tschuppik (1816–1882), was a senior forestry manager who in 1870 moved from Prague to Vienna where, at the Ministry of Finance, he managed large forests in Galicia and Bohemia (HBRKMM, 119). Josef Lorenz had been appointed Forstmeister in Eger (Bohemia) c. 1867 and was a member of the Verein deutscher Forstleuter in Böhmen (see Österreichische Forst-Zeitung): marriage to a daughter of one of his senior colleagues may have appeared to be advantageous, but apparently the relationship broke down before very long. In the summer of 1882, the Krzyzanowski brothers and the Tschuppik sisters all travelled to Bayreuth for the first production of Parsifal, and Marie was registered as Rudolf's wife (HBRKMM, 129). There can be little doubt that Rudolf, for a time at least, cared deeply for Marie, but in 1892 she travelled to Munich to be close to her sisters, and the relationship with Rudolf came to an end (HBRKMM, 130). The conjectural dating of the five songs offered above is based on the premise that they probably date from an early stage in Rudolf's relationship with Marie.

Klothilde, unlike her sisters, never married, but after study in Munich was active as a painter. Her illegitimate son, Heinrich, was registered at birth under his father's surname, and was brought up by Heinrich as his son:³ it was only when he came of age at 21 that he adopted his mother's surname. He trained as a musician, and played a major role in the discovery of the Symphonisches Praeludium, attributed by some scholars to Anton Bruckner, a work that had survived thanks to a manuscript score prepared in 1876 by his uncle, Rudolf.