The circumstance that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy searched all his life in vain for suitable material for an opera easily obscures the fact that he actually produced a considerable output of incidental music – from the Singspiele of his childhood and youth up to the large-scale works of incidental music of the 1840s for the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV.; also an opera fragment based on the Loreley material has survived.

The volume „Kleinere Bühnenwerke“ (Minor stage works) of the complete edition contains – with the exception of the above-mentioned scores – all other works that can be attributed to the genre of musical drama, whereby the term „stage works“ is applied in a broad sense, since they also comprise pieces that are on the border between a concertante and a stage performance: several fragments from his childhood years, the contribution, published in 1833, for a festival of the Berlin poet Wilhelm Emil Julius, four works of incidental music for the Düsseldorf theatre (1833–1835) and a piece of convenience for the Leipzig theatre (music for Ruy Blas with the first version of the corresponding overture of 1839). In addition to these (complete and fragmentary) scores, the volume includes arrangements of individual movements of these works. It therefore represents a compilation of works which in terms of instrumentation, character and dimensions are extremely diverse – and today for the most part unknown.