The Sixth Symphony was Vierne's last large-scale composition for organ. A six-part Messe basse pour les défunts would follow in 1934, but that is muted, minor, functional. Composed between July 15 and September 15, 1930, at Roquebrune on the Mediterranean, as he approached his 60th birthday, the Sixth Symphony, on the other hand, is testamentary, if not confessional. Among other things, it is a testament of his triumphant career as organist, inspired improviser, and acclaimed composer. But it is also the tormented confession to a lifetime of disappointment, professional frustration, failing health, blindness, loss (of friends, family, wife, lovers), betrayal, and despair. To this work Vierne brought the full range of chromatic writing that had increasingly marked his later music; the first and second movements both have tone row-like themes that use all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

The extended first movement Introduction et Allegro is a pilgrim's progress from distressed darkness to defiant acceptance. Though its agony of spirit is palpable, it is not without grandeur. The mournfully pleading Aria which follows wanders in the Slough of Despond—the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The Scherzo is one of Vierne's grotesqueries, a brief but disturbingly bizarre exercise in grim playfulness. Beginning in and returning to the organ's lowest register, a long Adagio traces a progress from profound depression, through despairing regret, to resignation. The remarkable Final makes tormented play of two themes—the first of grim cheer and a second which seems to smile through tears—which are less combined than juxtaposed in a determined tour-de-force coda to make Vierne's last and somewhat frenetic show of virile assertiveness. The intensely personal nature of the Sixth Symphony, and the fact that Vierne's keyboard technique had begun to slip with age, no doubt account for the fact that it was left to Vierne's pupil, Maurice Duruflé, to give the work its delayed premiere, at Notre Dame, in 1935.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide