The brevity and apparent lack of formal structure in the Op. 28 preludes caused some consternation among critics at the time of their publication.[verification needed] No prelude is longer than 90 bars (No. , and the shortest, No. 9, is a mere 12 bars. Schumann said: "They are sketches, beginnings of études, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions."[9] Liszt's opinion, however, was more positive: "Chopin's Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart... they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams..."
Among more recent assessments, musicologist Henry Finck said that "if all piano music in the world were to be destroyed, excepting one collection, my vote should be cast for Chopin's Preludes." Biographer Jeremy Nicholas writes that "Even on their own, the 24 Preludes would have ensured Chopin's claim to immortality."
Despite the lack of formal thematic structure, motives do appear in more than one prelude. Scholar Jeffrey Kresky has argued that Op. 28 is more than the sum of its parts:
Individually they seem like pieces in their own right ... But each works best along with the others, and in the intended order ... The Chopin preludes seem to be at once twenty-four small pieces and one large one. As we note or sense at the start of each piece the various connections to and changes from the previous one, we then feel free to involve ourselves – as listeners, as players, as commentators – only with the new pleasure at hand.
—Jeffrey Kresky in A Reader's Guide to the Chopin Preludes. (Wikipedia)