He also studied music, most likely with either the Ukrainian virtuoso lutanist Timofey Belogradsky, then resident in Königsberg, or his student Johann Friedrich Reichardt.

The following year, 1772, Lenz accompanied the Kleist brothers to the garrisons of Landau, Fort Louis and Wissembourg.

While the two of them were visiting Emmendingen, Goethe introduced Lenz to his sister Cornelia and her husband Johann Georg Schlosser.

His younger brother Karl fetched him in June 1779 from Hertingen, where he was under treatment by a doctor, and brought him to Riga, where their father had risen to the position of General Superintendent.

He then took a position as a private tutor on an estate near Dorpat, returned to St. Petersburg for a time, and then went to Moscow in September 1781, where initially he stayed with the historian Friedrich Müller and learned Russian.

He worked as a private tutor, mixed in the circles of Russian Freemasons and authors, and helped produce a number of reformist schemes.

In the early morning of 4 June 1792 (24 May in the Julian calendar) Lenz was found dead in a Moscow street.

In his 1923 play Weh um Michael, Waldfried Burggraf presented the life of Lenz, explaining his suicide as an act of despair at not finding an audience for his critique of society.

One literary critic summarizes Burggraf's treatment: "His Michael Lenz is a voice in the wilderness crying out against moral and social injustice.

Celan also says of his work "Conversation in the Mountains," composed after a missed encounter with Adorno, that it was written from such a date: that he started writing from his own "20th of January."

More recently the writers Peter Schneider, in his story Lenz (1973), and Gert Hoffmann, in his novella Die Rückkehr des verlorenen J.M.R.