In late nineteenth-century Vienna the symphony was fraught with cultural significance; it was widely seen as the musical genre, if not the art form, that most directly could, as Paul Bekker later put it, build a “community of feeling,” a process of acute significance in the Habsburg Empire at a time when the old imperial system was increasingly strained by ethnic, nationalist, and democratic impulses. As a result, music became the focus of great cultural and political energy, and aesthetic judgments often encoded cultural politics; in particular, Wagner and the “Music of the Future” excited nationalist, Socialist, racist, and aestheticist sentiments and fueled the energies of segments of society, especially youth, alienated by the liberalism and rationalism of the established social order. Bruckner's symphonies, with their epic grandeur, monumentality, expressive fervor, and harmonic complexity, were widely linked to this Wagnerian ethos and cast as radical counterweights to the concert works of Brahms, who hewed more closely to traditional stylistic canons and, not coincidentally, was solidly entrenched as the composer of the Viennese bourgeois establishment. The critical reception of Bruckner's symphonies makes it quite clear that, intentionally or not, they antagonized segments of the haute bourgeoisie.

It was in this context that the Eighth Symphony received its premiere. The symphony was the sole work in the Vienna Philharmonic subscription concert conducted by Hans Richter on 18 December 1892. Bruckner's music had only rarely appeared on the program of a Philharmonic subscription concert.