Wilhelm von Lenz was a Baltic German

Baltic German

The Baltic Germans were mostly ethnically German inhabitants of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, which today form the countries of Estonia and Latvia. The Baltic German population never made up more than 10% of the total. They formed the social, commercial, political and cultural élite in...

 Russian official and writer. Wilhelm von Lenz was a friend of many mid-century Romantic composers, including Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

, Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

 and Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...

, Lenz's most important and influential work was an early biography of the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

, entitled Beethoven et ses trois styles (1855), written in response to the disparagement of Beethoven by Alexander Ulybyshev

Alexander Ulybyshev

Alexander D. Ulybyshev or Alexandre Oulibicheff was a wealthy landowner, an influential biographer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the most important early patron of Mily Balakirev.-Life:...

 in his Nouvelle biographie de Mozart (1843). Lenz promoted the idea (already suggested by earlier figures such as François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, composer, critic and teacher. He was one of the most influential music critics of the 19th century, and his enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today...

) that Beethoven's musical style be divided into three characteristic periods. Lenz's periodisation, with minor changes, is still widely used today by musicologists in discussing Beethoven's compositions.