During his career Draeseke divided his efforts almost equally among compositional genres and composed in most of them, including symphonies, concertos, opera, chamber music, and works for solo piano. With his early Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor "Sonata quasi Fantasia" of 1862–1867 he aroused major interest, winning Liszt's unreserved admiration of it as one of the most important piano sonatas after Beethoven. His operas "Herrat" (1879, originally "Dietrich von Bern") and "Gudrun" (1884, after the medieval epic of the same name) met with some success, but were subsequently neglected.