Born in 1823, Brahms wanted to be a pianist and a composer. Throughout his life, he searched ways to improve and perfect his technique. His love and admiration of Beethoven’s works sparked his interest in the works of Schumann and Chopin, whose works he included in his repertoire. He performed Bach’s chromatic fantasy and Toccata, Beethoven’s 4th and 5th concertos, Schumann’s symphonic etudes and Schubert’s works in most of his concerts. In his troublesome life, he produced outstanding works including 4 symphonies, Academic Festival Overture, and variations on Handel, Schumann, Paganini and his own theme, 2 piano concertos, 2 piano sonatas, 1 violin, 1 violin and violin cello concerto, ballades and Intermezzos, piano and string quartet, trio quartet and quintet for piano and violin, scherzo, sonata, short piano pieces and 8 chamber music works with piano. His adherence to Neo-classical forms makes him a Neo-classical artist. His Neo-classical ideas oppose the innovative ideas of Wagner and Lizst, even though he had a considerable amount of German romantics of the late 19th Century. Since his works are set on wide ranges on the whole keyboard, they are more suitable for large hands but they require a certain amount of flexibility for smaller hands to play. Being aware of the differences in anatomic structure of each pianist, Brahms suggested different exercises to different pianists designed specifically to their needs to bring out their abilities. Since being a piano instructor consumed most of his time and prevented him from practicing the piano, he tried to find exercises which would help in playing the complex piano works easier. He used these exercises on himself and his students but he never considered publishing them or collect them into a book, as most of these exercises were improvised and unwritten. He improvised new exercises according to his student’s specific problems. Observing the usefulness of these exercises, Clara Schumann insisted that he published these exercises as a book. Brahms studied Czerny’s etudes to have an idea about etude techniques, and he gathered his works into a book. Denied by the Simrock, he sent his etudes to Edition Peters. After shortening the whole work over time and adding new etudes, he published the final version as 51 Exercises. Brahms considered these exercises to be a preliminary study to overcome the technical difficulties in his own works as well as other composers’ works. The 51 Exercises consist of polyrhythms, wide range arpeggios for the left and the right hand, whole keyboard usage, dual sounds, chords, held sounds, legatos, and leaps. Even though piano exercises are not generally known to be melodic, Brahms’s perfect harmony made these exercises notably melodic. 

Even though the work is titled “51 Exercises”, it consists of 88 exercises; some exercises being solo and some divided into a,b,c sections. He put the most emphasis on improving the movements of the fingers, with the exercises in which different notes are held each time. In the romantic era, the hand was used in wide positions as an innovation. This new technique was not used in the neo-classical era, in which the hands were used in narrower positions. Since pianists with smaller hands have a limited flexibility between their 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers, they face difficulties playing works that require wide range hand motions. The lack of reflexes prevent some pianists from performing successful leaps. Within these 51 exercises, 21 of them include held notes, 8 of them include wide range and 13 of them include dual tierce. The first 6 exercises are composed in separate rhythms for each hand and are polyrhythmic, similar to the classical era sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. These exercises start with a particular tone but gradually evolve into different tones with each modulation, and making these exercises more difficult to play. This article is a detailed analysis of Brahm’s 51 exercises.