These Three Studies for piano represent the culmination of Bartók's efforts to compose pedagogical piano works. Like Debussy's etudes, Bartók's studies were intended to help pianists develop certain skills and overcome particular technical difficulties. Bartók's studies were designed primarily as exercises focusing on the expansion and contraction of the pianist's hand, though there is some evidence to suggest that he also planned to include these pieces in his concert repertoire. However, in a letter written nearly two decades later, Bartók admitted to a friend that "I cannot play the three Etudes. I haven't played them—ever or anywhere—since 1918." While it is unknown why Bartók could not play his own pieces, this fact certainly testifies to their extreme difficulty.

A number of writers have drawn connections between Bartók and Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, the father of atonality and dodecaphony. While the two composers could not have directly influenced each other, their respective developments are uncannily similar, and Bartók's contrapuntal textures combined with chromaticism and harmonic ambiguity often create a quasi-atonal effect. As a result, much of Bartók's piano music dating from the early decades of the century is likened, in musicological texts, to Schoenberg's piano music, in particular the important Klavierstücke, Op. 11. While Schoenberg's work is important to consider when looking at Bartók's piano music, in the case of the Three Studies one must also look back a little further, to the studies of such composers as Chopin and Debussy, and perhaps also Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The studies of Chopin and Debussy in particular, with their focus on specific technique in each piece, are the most direct ancestors of Bartók's Three Studies.

The Three Studies are arranged in the order of fast-slow-fast. This ordering suggests the traditional structure of the three movement keyboard sonata. The first Study is an exploration in what commentators have identified as disjunct chromaticism; that is, the one hand plays major and minor seconds and thirds, while the other plays the same intervals one octave apart (as ninths and tenths). The result is that the outermost fingers of the hand are rigorously stretched, with brief periods of relaxation in between to allow for the hands to contract. Harmonic ambiguity and bitonality are important features of this piece, which is built around a single motive. In the second Study, Bartók emphasizes the left hand, which is in constant motion, expanding and contracting in order to play consistent arpeggios. This Study is deceptively simple: a two-part form in which each part contains similar harmonic events belies the sophistication of Bartók's transformation and reinterpretation of harmonic material. The Third study, like its predecessor, also contains arpeggios in the left hand, while the right hand plays chords. It is cast in a simple ternary form (A-B-A) with a short introduction. The most challenging feature of this final study, aside from its speed, is the constantly shifting meter, reflecting Bartók's free treatment of rhythm.

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