Halm was passionate about Bruckner's music and its significance for the history of symphonic technique, but at first he was not fully committed to writing a book on the subject. He had just completed the manuscript of Von zwei Kulturen (VzK) in early July 1912—the product of over two years' work, on and off, amid other activities—when his publisher, Georg Müller, proposed a volume on Bruckner. As we learned in chapter 1, the conversation with Müller began in early September 1912, and by mid-month Halm had produced and submitted an outline to Müller for what would become Die Symphonie Anton Bruckners (SAB). The prospect of starting work on a new project at first motivated Halm, especially the “pile of money” he hoped to earn in royalties. While waiting for a reaction from Müller on the Bruckner proposal, Halm wrote to Hilda, as he had a year earlier in connection with VzK, that he would “bid farewell” to writing after publishing a book of collected essays—an early reference to what became Von Grenzen und Ländern der Musik (1916). Not until March 1913 at the earliest, after proofreading the galleys for VzK, it appears, did Halm begin writing the book.

In addition to the prospect of financial reward from book sales, the motivation for writing SAB may have been a polemical one, as Carl Dahlhaus speculated. Proposing Bruckner's symphony in VzK as the sign of a third culture—at once a symphonic culmination and music-cultural redemption—can be understood, Dahlhaus declared, as a “secretly polemical challenge to Beethoven worship, then still overwhelming and sacrosanct.”