Giuseppe Verdi

His ten planets divide three in air, three in water, two in fire and two in earth, with four of the ten cardinal, and Pluto alone was retrograde. The record says Verdi wrote twenty six operas and became a symbol of Italian unification, and that he spent his fortune building a retirement home for musicians in Milan and called it his finest work.

The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at under half a degree at seventeen degrees of Libra, which fuses identity to the act of stating a thing, and both of them are then pressed against Jupiter: Mercury in mild friction with it at twelve hundredths of a degree and the Sun at a third. The readings are scale outrunning accuracy, and belief in one's own scale meeting a limit, so the fused pair is being argued with by size from both sides at once. Twenty six operas and then a fortune spent housing retired musicians is a working life that answers the question of scale twice and in opposite directions.

Saturn sits in quiet contact with Neptune at a fifth of a degree, which is imagination made durable: artists who finish things, and faith that survives being examined. For a composer who finished twenty six of them and then built something out of brick, that contact is doing more work than any of the others here. His Moon sits at twenty three degrees of Aries at noon, close enough to the next sign that it may have reached Taurus, so it is left out. Nothing in it closes into a figure.

He died at Milan on 27 January 1901, at eighty seven. The transiting Sun was in Aquarius against his natal Libra, air answering air, with Jupiter in easy contact with its own natal place at under four tenths of a degree, Venus conjunct his natal Saturn at half, and Pluto in easy contact with his natal Sun at just under nine tenths. The Moon was at its first quarter and half lit, the phase that acts decisively and often has to break something to do it.