While Felix Mendelssohn lived during the period of Romanticism, he was in many ways faithful the Classical tradition. Mendelssohn was so immersed in the music from the era of Handel and Bach that he never fully joined with the composers of his own day in forging that new path (to the eternal chagrin of some and the joy of others!). Baroque mannerisms do lurk, secretly, in Mendelssohn's music, but one often needs a musical magnifying glass to discover them. More obvious is the esteem—were not Mendelssohn so famously well-balanced an individual, one might almost say that the esteem bordered on obsession—in which Mendelssohn held Baroque forms and vessels, as can be seen from the story of his opus-less Prelude and Fugue in E minor for piano (which must not be confused with the Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op. 35).

Mendelssohn composed the fugue in June 1827, a little less than half a year after his eighteenth birthday. But to a Bach or a Handel, the idea of a fugue standing on its own was an almost reprehensible one, and Mendelssohn inherited that loathing. In July 1841, tired of seeing his fourteen-year-old fugue lying around bereft of a musical companion, he wrote a prelude for it. (It was not the first time he wrote preludes for already-existing fugues—indeed, all of the Op. 35 preludes and fugues were composed in this back-end-first way, though the separation between pieces, while still sometimes several years, was not nearly fourteen years.) The Prelude and Fugue in E minor are usually designated "opus posthumous" but were in fact published in 1842, several years before Mendelssohn's death.

The prelude, or, more properly, Praeludium, is marked Allegro molto. It begins with a plain, unharmonized four-bar thought in the middle bass register and then proceeds along more congested lines—rushing triplets, pointed sforzandi. The fugue subject of the fugue can easily be recognized, even in the thickest of moments, by its opening gesture: a dramatic plunge down the interval of a seventh.

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