Benjamin Britten

Water takes five of his ten planets, with two apiece in earth and air and a single one in fire. The Sun sits twenty five arcminutes from the end of Scorpio, and four of the ten planets were retrograde. The record says Britten wrote Peter Grimes and the War Requiem and founded the Aldeburgh Festival, and that he was a pacifist who registered as a conscientious objector and wrote his requiem for the consecration of a bombed cathedral.

Five planets in water, in a composer, is the fit a reader expects and the one worth least. Water is the element of what is felt rather than what is said or built, and a reading that gives a composer feeling has told nobody anything. The useful half of the count is the other side: a single planet in fire, in a man whose record contains a public refusal to fight, which is a position that takes more holding than most.

The Moon sits square Saturn at just over a degree, need meeting refusal: loneliness, difficulty asking for anything, and being far more self-sufficient than was ever wanted. For a pacifist who registered as a conscientious objector in wartime, that is a reading about isolation landing on a record that contains an isolating decision, and it is a resonance rather than a cause. Its sign is certain at fifteen degrees of Virgo, which settles a feeling by finding a task, and writing a requiem for the consecration of a bombed cathedral is that done at scale.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Jupiter at a quarter of a degree, the closest contact here, scale outrunning accuracy, and at an awkward angle to Pluto at seven tenths, thought becoming compulsion: rumination, and using knowledge as leverage. Neither has anything in the record to meet it. Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Aldeburgh on 4 December 1976, at sixty three, in the town where the record says he founded the festival. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day, which makes it a notably quiet sky, and the Moon was gibbous and ninety five per cent lit.