Joseph Haydn

Not one of his ten planets sits in a water sign. Fire takes five, air four and a single one earth, with five of the ten cardinal and only one fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn fill ten degrees of Aries. The record says Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and effectively invented the string quartet, working for thirty years in the livery of one aristocratic family, and that Mozart called him father and Beethoven studied with him.

No water at all, in a composer, is the count to lead on, because of how firmly a reader will expect the opposite. Water is the element of what is felt, and the standing assumption is that music comes out of it. This chart has none. It has five planets in fire and four in air instead, which are the elements of doing and of comparing, and for a man who produced 104 symphonies and a new form while wearing somebody else's livery, output and system are a better account of the record than feeling is.

The Moon sits a fifth of a turn from Saturn at thirteen hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here, and the reading is emotional steadiness: people who are reliable in a crisis and who do not require much reassurance. Thirty years in one household's service is reliability as a working condition rather than as a temperament, and this is the contact where the chart and the record describe the same shape. Its sign is certain at nineteen degrees of Gemini.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Venus at under three quarters of a degree, about as hard an angle as those two can make, and the reading is a tendency to say the agreeable thing rather than the accurate one. In a court composer that is pointed, and the record gives nothing to test it against, so it stays printed and unresolved. Venus sits in quiet contact with Neptune at under four tenths, a real gift for beauty, colour and music, which is the cheapest fit available in any composer's chart and is named here only because the orb is tighter than most. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Vienna on 31 May 1809, at seventy seven. Jupiter stood in direct opposition to his natal Pluto at five hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was full and ninety three per cent lit.