Claude Debussy

Four planets out of ten sit in fire and four in earth, leaving one each in air and water. Fire asserts and earth consolidates; the elements that would describe a thing from outside or feel its temperature are both nearly absent. Debussy loosened harmony from the rules it had followed for two centuries and disliked being called an impressionist for it, which is a man who broke a system and then refused the label that came with breaking it.

The Sun sits on the twenty ninth degree of Leo, the last of the sign, with Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn all in Virgo ahead of it. Leo asserts and expects to be looked at; Virgo takes the thing apart and corrects it. A Sun on the point of crossing from one into the other, with three planets already over the line, is the plainest chart statement of a composer whose work was both a grand gesture and an exercise in exactness.

Mercury makes a quintile to Uranus at zero orb, exact to the arcminute. A quintile is a skill rather than a struggle, and this one ties the faculty of arranging ideas to the planet that refuses an inherited pattern, at no distance at all. In a man whose whole contribution was a new way of putting notes next to each other, that is the single aspect worth leading with. Neptune and Pluto were both retrograde at his birth.

He died in Paris on 25 March 1918, at fifty five, during the bombardment of the city, and the funeral was nearly unattended. The Moon that day was gibbous and almost full, the phase that keeps refining and rarely calls anything finished. The Sun had reached Aries, fire, the same element as his natal Leo, and stood conjunct his natal Neptune within two thirds of a degree, with Pluto square that same Neptune at a ninth. A crossing attended by almost nobody, with the planet of dissolving at the centre of the sky.