After however much textual exegesis and background thinking one must, if one raises the idea of mysticism in Rubbra, finally turn to the music's inscrutable, ambiguous but all-important testimony. Probing the Sixth Symphony for the stigmata as identified by Elsie Payne, one can take its opening mood merely as a point of departure, from itself and from the past; the first movement's overriding vigour and variety would of itself hardly point to mystical thoughts. The melody is if anything less ‘ambiguous in tonality’ than others of Rubbra's, and bottomless 6–4 chords are not much in evidence, though the harp is used a good deal. The ‘happy birds’ interludes, like the running violins at ‘Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloriae Tuae’ in the Sanctus of Schubert's A♭ Mass, could suggest the pantheistic joy of the ‘Vision of Dame Kind’. One should also note the curious start, with its first melodic figure sounding like an end rather than a beginning. Conversely, the finale, having been written first, was creatively speaking a beginning rather than an ending. (Benedict's memoir speaks of his father as ‘always conscious of beginning and end within a circle’.)