Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) had already begun to acquire a special status during his lifetime, but after his death, his existence was immediately deified, and he became a master in music history. Many musicians of the post-Beethoven era took his piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies as creative models and diligently studied their scores.

Young Robert Schumann was one of them. Just as Richard Wagner (1813-1883) undertook a piano arrangement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in 1831, Schumann also created an arrangement around the same time, extending to the 249th measure of the first movement (near the end of the development section's fugato). Although extremely faithful to the original score, the presence of excessively wide intervals in many places and detailed instrumental markings suggests that this arrangement was not intended for performance or publication, but rather solely for the purpose of studying the work.

While studying and researching Beethoven's works, Schumann decided to compose etudes based on the master's themes. In 1831/32, under the German title Etüden in freier Variationenform über ein Thema von Beethoven (Studies in Free Variation Form on a Theme by Beethoven), he composed 11 etudes based on the theme of Symphony No. 7, second movement, Allegretto, in A minor (of which the 9th and final pieces were unfinished).

In 1833, a second version consisting of nine pieces (three of which were unfinished) was completed. Six of these were based on the first version, but the order of arrangement was significantly altered, and the other three pieces were newly composed. The title changed to the French Études d'après un thème de Beethoven (Studies after a Theme by Beethoven), and it was dedicated to Clara Wieck (1819-1896), who would later become his wife.

Furthermore, in the same year, a third version (final version) consisting of seven pieces, Exercices (translated as "Etudes" in Japanese, but the original word differs from "Etüden" in the first version), was completed. Here, the order of pieces from the first and second versions was rearranged again, while some were deleted, and two new pieces were added. All are in A minor; the shortest, the final piece, is only 14 measures long, and even the longest, the fifth piece, is 32 measures, making all of them miniatures. (While the current Neue Schumann-Gesamtausgabe (New Schumann Complete Edition) adopts the title of the final version and these seven pieces, the title of the first version, Über ein Thema von Beethoven (On a Theme by Beethoven), is generally more common, and it is often performed as "Theme and 15 Variations," mixing four pieces each from the first and second versions, totaling eight pieces.)

The final version, like Beethoven's original, begins with the sound of the A minor tonic chord (second inversion) as a signal for the first piece. However, among the seven pieces, only the fourth piece clearly indicates that Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 Allegretto is its prototype, where the soprano voice imitates its rhythm (♩ ♫ ♩ ♩) and melody. The most symbolic homage to Beethoven is the final seventh piece, which uses as its material the accompaniment reminiscent of string tremolos from the opening of Symphony No. 9's first movement, along with descending motives of a fourth (A-E) and a fifth (E-A). However, it also has a connection to Symphony No. 7, with a portion of the opening movement's theme appearing for two measures midway through.

The first publication of this work came in 1976, more than 140 years after its composition, by G. Henle Verlag in Munich. (An exception is the fifth piece of the second version, which was published in 1854 as the third piece, "Leides Ahnung" (Foreboding of Sorrow), in Albumblätter (Album Leaves), Op. 124, a collection of 20 miniatures composed up to that point.) In other words, it remained unreleased for a long time as an unnumbered study, yet around 1834-35, Schumann had completed a fair copy of the final version. This suggests that Schumann might have been exploring the possibility of publishing this work at the time. For Schumann, who began his career as a composer in the 1830s, it is inconceivable that he did not have a strong attachment to this work, which combined the colossal figure of "Beethoven" as a creative benchmark with the "Étude" genre he explored in numerous piano pieces during this period.