Franz Liszt

Water holds four of his ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one earth. Water registers a thing and fire acts on it; the element that would hold it in place is down to one planet. The record calls Liszt the first modern touring virtuoso and the reason concert pianists play from memory and sit sideways to the audience, and says he took minor orders in the Catholic Church in later life.

The Sun sits on the twenty ninth degree of Libra with Mercury at twelve, both in the sign that works itself out in relation to other people. Saturn and Neptune sit in Sagittarius, and his Moon sits at twenty six degrees of the same sign at noon, though it may have crossed into Capricorn. Venus sits on the first degree of Scorpio. For a performer who rearranged how a concert is given, a Libra Sun that cannot settle a question without an audience in the room is the placement to start from.

Mars is tied to both Uranus and Pluto. It sits sixty degrees from Uranus at just under three fifths of a degree, which reads as quick reflexes and an instinct for the unconventional move, and sixty degrees from Pluto at just under nine tenths, power under command: strategic effort, and strength that does not need demonstrating. In the first pianist to tour like that, those two openings are the ones that explain the method. Mercury sits a fifth of the way round from Saturn at just under a degree, organisation and long concentration. Pluto alone was retrograde at his birth.

He died at Bayreuth on 31 July 1886, at seventy four. Venus rules his Libra Sun, and that day Mercury sat sixty degrees from that Venus at sixteen hundredths of a degree while Venus itself stood conjunct his natal Jupiter at half a degree. Mars stood square its own natal place at seven tenths and Saturn in easy contact with his natal Pluto at just under a degree. The Moon was new and entirely unlit, the phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them, which for a man the record has entering the Church late is a strange and fitting sky to go out under.