Allusions to sublimity often color descriptions of Bruckner's music. Program notes and serious criticism alike have long effused about the transcendent, metaphysical depth of the symphonies, and the Adagio of the Eighth Symphony has been identified as “sublime” with particular frequency. Josef Schalk's program identified the Adagio as a “sphere of calm, solemn sublimity,” and ever since, the term “sublime” has been prone to attach itself to this movement. A popular guide to Bruckner's symphonies published in 1907 called this Adagio “one of the most solemnly transfigurative, splendid, and sublime tone-pieces ever written.” Bruckner's first American biographer, Gabriel Engel, referred to it as “the sublime slow movement … [that] rises to unprecedented heights of devotional ecstasy.” As recently as 1997 Edward Rothstein placed the Eighth on a short list of works that successfully aspire to sublimity.

The tradition of linking Bruckner's symphonies with transcendent sublimity derives from various sources. It reflects the common awareness of Bruckner's religiosity as a person, as a church musician, and as a composer of both sacred music and symphonies. The genre of the symphony itself has long been associated with the sublime. Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1792) identified the symphonic Allegro as a genre “admirably suited to the expression of grandeur, of the festive and sublime.” Some eighty years later, Wagner declared in his centenary essay Beethoven that “the only aesthetic term to use” to describe the effect of Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies is “the Sublime.”