Edward Elgar

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Earth and air take four each with two in water. The Sun, Mercury and Mars sit inside three degrees of Gemini, which is a very tight group, and Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto spread across twenty two degrees of Taurus. Mercury was the only retrograde planet. The record says Elgar was largely self-taught and unknown until the Enigma Variations at forty two, and that the tune from the first Pomp and Circumstance march became Land of Hope and Glory, which he came to dislike.

Mars sits in quiet contact with Saturn at four hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart, and the reading is sustained effort: craftsmanship, training, and the rare ability to work at something for years. One of those three clauses is wrong and one is exactly right. The training is the wrong one, because the record says largely self-taught. The ability to work at something for years is the right one, and the number is forty two: that is how long he worked before anybody noticed.

Three planets inside three degrees of Gemini is the structural half. Gemini is built around knowing things and passing them on, and having the Sun, Mercury and Mars that close puts identity, speech and drive in one place in the sign that explains. The Sun sits conjunct Mars at a degree and a third inside it, self and will being the same thing, which carries a standing clause about criticism landing as attack. The record's second fact is a tune he came to dislike, which is a man taking against his own most popular work rather than against a critic.

No fire at all, in a composer with that output, is a count worth a line and no conclusion. The Moon sits in easy contact with Mars at a degree and a half, feelings translating into action cleanly, with its sign certain at fifteen degrees of Libra, which is genuinely destabilised by conflict. He died at Worcester on 23 February 1934, at seventy six. The transiting Sun stood sixty degrees from his natal Jupiter at a tenth of a degree that day, Neptune in easy contact with his natal Venus at just over a quarter, and Pluto in easy contact with his natal Neptune at a third. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy one per cent lit.