The Easiest Brahms Pieces, Measured

Brahms has a reputation as the least beginner-friendly of the great Romantics — thick chords, wide stretches, hands that seem to have been designed for somebody with a larger reach than yours. Most of that reputation is deserved.

But it is not the whole picture. We measured all 95 Brahms transcriptions in this library. They run from 16 out of 100 all the way to 100 — he owns one of only two pieces in the entire collection at the absolute ceiling. Here they are, easiest first.

The famous one is also the easiest one

At the top of the list, at 16 out of 100 and thirty-nine seconds long, is the Wiegenlied — the Brahms Lullaby, the tune half the world has been sung to sleep by.

It was first published in 1868, as Op. 49 No. 4. The words come from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the great collection of German folk poetry, with a second verse added by Georg Scherer in 1849. And it was a private message. Brahms dedicated it to Bertha Faber when her second son was born; he had been in love with her years earlier, and he built the melody so that a song she used to sing to him — a duet by Alexander Baumann published in the 1840s — runs underneath it as a hidden countermelody. It is the most famous lullaby ever written and it is also a coded note between two people.

For a beginner it is close to ideal: short, slow, harmonically plain, and instantly recognisable to anyone who hears you play it.

Then go to the waltzes

The second and third entries on the measured list are both from the Op. 39 waltzes, and that is where a beginner's Brahms should continue.

They are short — around a minute each — and they are the least characteristically dense music he wrote, because a waltz needs air. The left hand does the familiar bass-then-chord pattern rather than the interlocking counterpoint that makes so much Brahms hard to hold in two hands. Several of them sit in the twenties on our scale.

Where it stops being possible

The measured list has a cliff in it, and you should know where.

Below about 30, you are in songs and waltzes and it is genuinely approachable. Between 30 and 55, the intermezzos and the more demanding Lieder — playable, but you will be working. Above 55, Brahms becomes Brahms: chords that need a tenth, melodies buried in inner voices, and a rhythmic habit of setting two against three that letter notes render accurately and your hands will still find alien.

The very hardest thing in this library, tied at 100 out of 100, is a Brahms song — Wie bist du, meine Königin, from the Op. 32 Lieder. Worth knowing why: in letter notes a song's vocal line and its piano part are folded into one, so you are playing every sounding note at once. A singer would take the top line off your hands. Our hardest pieces page explains that measurement quirk in full.

If your hands are small

This is the honest constraint with Brahms and it is worth saying plainly: much of his piano writing assumes a comfortable ninth and often asks for more. If a chord is out of reach, you have three real options and none of them is failure.

Roll it. Play the bottom note fractionally early and let the pedal hold it. This is what most pianists do and it is stylistically fine in Romantic music.

Drop a note. In a four-note chord, the note doubling something already sounding is the one to leave out. Keep the bass and the top.

Transpose the whole piece. The transpose control shifts everything by semitones — it will not narrow a stretch, but it can move an awkward passage onto a part of the keyboard where your hand sits more naturally.

Where to go next

For the same measured treatment on composers who are kinder to beginners, see the easiest Schumann pieces and the easiest Mozart pieces. If short is what you need, pieces you can learn in one sitting is filtered for exactly that.

Facts about the Wiegenlied from Wikipedia). Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.