Gustav Mahler

Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, earth two and a single one air, with five of the ten fixed. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn spread across twenty two degrees of Leo, the sign that expects to be watched. The record says Mahler conducted for a living and composed in the summers, that he said a symphony must be like the world and contain everything, and that he was almost unperformed for fifty years after his death.

This is one of the loosest charts in the set, and in his case the looseness is the finding. Nothing here sits inside two thirds of a degree, and the tightest thing in it is Uranus in quiet contact with Pluto at seven tenths, which moves slowly enough to belong to a whole generation and says nothing about him. For the composer who wanted a symphony to contain everything, a chart that contains very little that is tightly wired is a contrast worth printing rather than smoothing over.

What there is: Venus sits conjunct Jupiter at just over a degree inside the Leo group, ease and goodwill, and Mercury sixty degrees from Uranus at a degree and a quarter, a mind that finds unexpected connections. The Sun sits at sixteen degrees of Cancer, which counts what is still being held, and his Moon sits on the fourth degree of Pisces at noon, with Aquarius still possible, so it is left out. Venus, Mars and Neptune were the three retrograde planets. A composer who conducted for a living and wrote in the summers had ease and goodwill in the performing sign, which is at least the right equipment for the half of the record that paid.

He died at Vienna on 18 May 1911, at fifty. Uranus stood sixty degrees from his natal Neptune at twelve hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky, with Mercury conjunct his natal Pluto at under half. The Moon was disseminating and seventy seven per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land, which for a body of work nobody played for fifty years is the phase the record itself argues for.