Located on Sweden's western (North Sea) coast, Göteborg became an important fishing, shipping, and manufacturing center. A violinist named Le Hay, with a few professional musicians as his staff, founded a music school for interested amateurs and organized teachers and their students into ad hoc ensembles that gave concerts between 1781 and 1791. The first subscription concerts were begun by Joseph Czapek, who settled in the city in 1847.

In 1905 an orchestral association, the Göteborgs Orkesterförening, was organized, with funding from local industrial concerns. The first concerts were given the same year.

In 1906 the society engaged composer Wilhelm Stenhammar to become the orchestra's principal conductor. He was a firm leader, with strong gifts for orchestra building and a widely ranging interest in new repertory. Stenhammar was an innovator as a symphony director. Reasoning that children benefited by exposure to orchestral music, he was among the first conductors anywhere to establish regular school outreach concerts. This has resulted in symphony concerts becoming one of the favorite forms of musical entertainment in Göteborg and the surrounding area. Stenhammar and the Göteborg Symphony were the first to introduce the music of Danish composer Carl Nielsen to Sweden.

The obstacle of Göteborg's lack of a suitable concert hall was remedied in 1935, with the opening of a municipally financed hall, the Göteborgs Konserthus. This hall of modern design vies with such venues as Boston's Orchestra Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in various commentators' opinions as the best-sounding concert hall in the world. The richness and clarity of the sound is one of the factors that have set the high standards the Göteborg Symphony has met.

In addition, the orchestra management over the years has shown notable skill in choosing Stenhammar's successors as music director, which have included Tor Mann, Ture Rängstrom, Issay Dobrowen, Sixten Eckerberg, Dean Dixon, Sten Frykberg, Sergiu Comissiona, Charles Dutoit, Sixten Ehrling, and, from 1982 to 2004, Estonian maestro Neeme Järvi. Mario Venzago served from 2004 until 2007, when Gustavo Dudamel was appointed the orchestra's principal director.

Soon after his accession to the podium of the orchestra, Järvi began a long association with Sweden's Bis record company that has made both Järvi and the orchestra world-famous. Järvi, exhibiting an astonishingly large repertory, began with a complete cycle of Sibelius recordings. With Järvi or others, on both the Bis and Deutsche Grammophon labels, the orchestra has produced dozens of recordings, including complete cycles of music with orchestra by Tubin, Nielsen, Grieg, Borodin, and several others, and the complete Rachmaninov operas. In May 1997, the Swedish Parliament and government appointed the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra as "Sweden's National Orchestra."