The Easiest Burgmüller Pieces, Measured

Most composers in this library wrote for concert halls, churches or drawing rooms, and beginners get whatever happens to fall within reach. Friedrich Burgmüller is different: he wrote for students, on purpose, in graded order, and that is why his name is still in every piano teacher's cupboard nearly two centuries later.

We measured all 19 Burgmüller pieces here. They run from 22 out of 100 to 59 — the narrowest range of any composer we have measured, and the only one with no hard end at all. Here they are, easiest first.

The narrowest range in the library

That 22-to-59 span is the whole point of this page.

Compare it with the others we have measured: Mozart runs 1 to 87, Brahms 16 to 100, Schumann 3 to 85, Handel 14 to 79. Every one of them has a cliff in it somewhere, and a beginner working through the catalogue eventually walks off it.

Burgmüller has no cliff. The hardest thing here, Inquiétude, measures 59 — which is roughly where the middle of Bach's or Chopin's output sits. You can start at the bottom of this list and play every piece on it, in order, without ever hitting something that stops you. Nothing else in this library offers that.

Who he was

Friedrich Burgmüller was born in 1806 and died in 1874. He was German, moved to Paris in 1832 at the age of twenty-six, and stayed there for the rest of his life — over forty years.

His concert music has essentially vanished. What survived him is his teaching material: the 25 Études faciles et progressives, Op. 100, written for early-intermediate students, plus two harder sets, Op. 105 and Op. 109. It is a slightly melancholy kind of immortality, and also a real one. Millions of people have played L'Arabesque.

They are studies that do not sound like studies

This is the thing that makes Burgmüller worth your time rather than merely worth your teacher's.

A technical study normally announces itself: repeated patterns, no tune, obvious drilling. Burgmüller hides the exercise inside a character piece. La Pastorale is a pastoral scene that happens to train an even left hand. La Chasse is a hunting piece that happens to train leaps. Le Courant Limpide is running water that happens to train finger independence.

Every one has a title, a mood and an ending, and none of them lasts more than about a minute — most sit between 24 and 60 seconds. You can learn one properly in a sitting and it will still sound like a piece of music when you play it to somebody.

Where to start

**Begin with La Petite Réunion (22) and Progrès (25).** These are the two gentlest, and Progrès is thirty-one seconds long.

**Then La Pastorale (29), La Candeur (33) and Consolation (33).** Still comfortable, and this is where the left hand starts doing something of its own.

***L'Arabesque is at 44*, roughly the middle of the set — worth knowing, because it is the one everybody learns first and reputation would put it lower. It is not the easiest Burgmüller. It is simply the most memorable.

**The top end — La Gracieuse (52), L'Adieu (56), Inquiétude (59)** — is the natural bridge out of beginner repertoire and into the Romantic music you actually want to play.

One caution about this list

One entry, El Perdón de Ploërmel, is a seventeen-minute opera fantasy and belongs to a completely different part of his output. Its measured score of 39 puts it in the middle of the list, but do not treat it as a next step after a forty-second study — it is long, and length is not what the difficulty score measures.

Where to go next

Burgmüller is the bridge, so the natural destinations are the composers on the far side of it: the easiest Schumann pieces, whose Album for the Young was written with the same intent, and the easiest Romantic pieces for the era as a whole. If you would rather keep finishing things quickly, pieces you can learn in one sitting.

Biographical facts from Wikipedia. Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.