Overture in G minor (WAB 98)

Bruckner sketched the Overture in G minor in November 1862 and completed it on Christmas Eve of that year, revising the coda a month later; it was written as an exercise for Otto Kitzler, the Linz theatre conductor guiding him through form and orchestration. He was already thirty-eight and had not yet begun a numbered symphony. Nothing came of the piece in his lifetime. Alfred Orel published it in 1921 in a collection of unknown early Bruckner, and Franz Moißl conducted the first performance at Klosterneuburg on 8 September of the same year, fifty-eight years after it was written.