The Easiest Schubert Pieces, Measured
Schubert wrote more than a thousand works before dying at thirty-one, and the library holds 103 of them. Measured, they run from 20 out of 100 to 93 — and the shape of that range says something specific about him that is worth knowing before you start.
There is no very easy Schubert
Look at the floor: 20. Compare it with Schumann at 3, Mozart at 1, Handel at 14, Brahms at 16. Schubert's gentlest music is meaningfully harder than the gentlest music of every other major composer in this library, and only 8 of his 103 pieces score under 40.
This is not an accident of what survived. Schubert essentially did not write teaching music. There is no Album for the Young, no set of graded studies, no equivalent of Burgmüller's twenty-five progressive pieces. He wrote songs for singers, chamber music for players who already played, and piano music of real scale. The domestic market he wrote into was one of competent amateurs, not beginners.
The easiest Schubert is his songs
Nearly everything in the first twenty of this list is a Lied — Die Nacht, Liebe, Jünglingswonne, a Winterreise number, Der Musensohn, Ave Maria. Only three of the first twenty look like solo piano music at all.
There is a reason, and it is the same measurement quirk that fills the hardest pieces page with Lieder — running in the opposite direction. A song's piano part was written to support a voice, so it is deliberately restrained: steady figuration, few leaps, nothing that would cover a singer. When the vocal line and the accompaniment are folded into one letter-note transcription, a simple strophic song stays simple, while a dramatic one becomes very dense indeed.
So Schubert's songs occupy both ends of this list. The gentle ones are the easiest thing he wrote; the dramatic ones (Erlkönig and its relatives) are near the top of the whole library.
What to do with that
Play the songs as piano pieces. They work. A strophic Schubert Lied is a melody with an accompaniment, which is exactly what a beginner's piano piece is — you are simply playing the singer's line yourself. Die Nacht at 20 and Liebe at 22 are the two most approachable things he wrote, and Liebe is 47 seconds long.
Then the dances. Schubert wrote hundreds of short waltzes, Ländler and Ecossaises for actual dancing at actual parties. They are short, sectional, and repetitive in the helpful way — the middle of this list is full of them.
Then the Impromptus, and understand what you are taking on. The eight Impromptus (D 899 and D 935, both 1827) are where most people want to arrive. The B♭ set of variations (D 935 No. 3) is the kindest way in, because variation form lets you learn one short section at a time. The G♭ Impromptu is the one everybody loves and it is not a beginner's piece.
Worth knowing: only two of the eight were published in his lifetime. D 899 Nos. 1 and 2 appeared as Op. 90; Nos. 3 and 4 waited until 1857, and the whole of D 935 until 1839, eleven years after his death.
The specific Schubert difficulty
It is not speed and it is not stretch. It is length and repetition.
Schubert repeats things — a phrase, a section, a whole idea in a new key — far more than his contemporaries, and his pieces run long because of it. Der Musensohn is nearly seven minutes; Ave Maria over seven. Nothing in them is individually hard. Holding concentration and evenness across all of it is.
That makes him unusually well suited to the A–B loop: pick one section, get it genuinely secure, then move the loop. Trying to play a long Schubert piece top to bottom repeatedly is the slow way to learn it.
Where to go next
If you want a composer who wrote deliberately for learners, the easiest Schumann pieces — the two men are often shelved together and could hardly be more different in this respect. For the era as a whole, the easiest Romantic pieces. And if length is the obstacle, pieces you can learn in one sitting filters for the opposite.
Facts about the Impromptus from Wikipedia). Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.